The tomb of the Griffin Warrior is one of the richest found on mainland Greece in recent years. This Bronze Age burial belongs to the transitional period in European prehistory when the Minoan culture of island Crete gave way to that of the Mycenaeans on the mainland, and its lavish grave goods are not only some of the most spectacular to have been recovered in the last few years, but are also providing important new information about the emergence of mainland Europe’s earliest civilisation.
The grave sits on a hilltop in Messenia, near the village of Chora, overlooking the south-west coast of the Peloponnese. It was here, in 1939, that Carl Blegen of the University of Cincinnati and Konstantinos Kourouniotis, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, discovered a Bronze Age palace – and though they were not to know it at the time, the palace turned out to be one of the finest and best-preserved examples of such a site in the whole of Greece.
They were searching for the palace of the legendary king Nestor, a wise old counsellor mentioned in both Homer’s Odyssey and his Iliad. However, the eve of the Second World War was not a good time to start an archaeological project, and as Europe erupted into conflict, investigations at the Palace of Nestor were suspended. Finally, in 1952, Blegen returned, and over the following 15 years, he and his team uncovered the fabulous remains of one of the most magnificent Mycenaean palaces on the Greek mainland. Destroyed by fire and abandoned in about 1200 BC, it had lain undisturbed for three millennia beneath an olive grove.
