Stylianos Alexiou

Sylianos Alexiou was born in 1921 in Heraklion, Crete. He came from a learned family: his father was Lefteris Alexiou (1890–1964), a writer and philologist and he had Elli Alexiou and Galatea Kazantzakis (the first wife of Nikos Kazantzakis) for his aunts.[2]^{: 167–168} His grandfather was the homonymous Stylianos Alexiou, the scholarly publisher of newspapers in Heraklion.

He studied at the School of Philosophy in the University of Athens (1939–46), from which he took his doctorate in 1959. He received a scholarship from the Centre national de la recherche scientifique and remained for the academic year 1951–52 at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and from 1960 to 1961 he was at the University of Heidelberg on scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

In 1947 he worked as Prefect of Antiquities on Rhodes and in 1950 transferred to the Heraklion Archaeological Museum. In 1960-61 he served as Ephor of Antiquities for Southern Crete, which has its seat in Chania, and in 1962 he took over direction of the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, until 1977[3] when he quit the General Ephorate of Antiquities. In 1973 and 1977 he had a place on the Archaeological Council of the Hellenic Ministry of Culture.[3] In 1977 he began to teach at the Philosophical School of the University of Crete[3] and in 1982 he was elected as the first professor of Mediaeval & Modern Greek literature in that school.[3]

From 1963 to 1964 he was the international editor of Kritkon Khronikon, a member of the editing committee of the epigraphic periodical Kadmos in London, and a member of such learned societies as the German Archaeological Institute, the British School at Athens, the Archaeological Society, the Association International d' Etudes Byzantines, the Society for Byzantine Studies, the Christian Archaeological Society, the Hellenic Folklore Society, the Society for Cretan Historical Studies, and finally, a Commendatore of the Italian Republic.[3] In 1981, he was honoured with the title of Corresponding Member of the Hellenic Folklore Society.[4]^: 168

In 1992 he was honored by the University of Padua for his contributions to Minoan archaeology and to Byzantine and Modern Greek philology. In 1993 the critical faculty of the National Literary Awards honoured him for all his inspired work with the Special National Literary Award for Literature (1993),[5] while in November 2000 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Athens.[6]^{: 219–223}

His principal archaeological works are the excavations of the chamber graves of Katsambas (the harbour of Knossos) from 1951 to 1963 and the early Minoan tholos tombs of Levinos-Lenda in 1958–66, his re-organisation and expansion by one-third of the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, with the addition of new wings (five new rooms with about twenty new exhibits), the founding of the Museums of Chania (1962) and Agios Nikolaos (1969), the development of the theory of the coordinated and anactoric character of the Minoan emporium (1958), the identification of the fortifications of Minoan Crete, his research on Luxor in Egypt, the study of Minoan sanitary cisterns (1972), and the location of Panormus-Apollonius and other cities of Greek Crete (1974). Finally, he attended to the special legislative designation of and protection of the Knossos area.[3]

He had discovered the earliest works of Cretan literature, back in 1952 in his study of the Erotokritos. His works on the subject number six books and thirty essays or contributed articles, with the most important being his linguistically restored edition of the Erotokritikos published in 1980.[3] According to Nicholas Panayotakis "...constituted one of the leading achievements of Modern Greek philology, a real landmark and tour-de-force..."[3] Likewise, he produced the critical Voskopoula, the Apokoopo which does not accept the didactic, moral and eschatalogical character human affairs that so many researchers since have presented[6] and the Erofili. He published many revisions, new interpretations, and observations on editions of texts, old and new, of literary criticism and Cretan theatre.[3]