Ancient Tenea’s enduring fascination

The broader vicinity of Tenea in southern Corinth has always been of interest to archaeologists, but also to antiquities smugglers. The Kouros of Tenea, for example, is a masterpiece of Hellenistic sculpture that has been at a Munich museum since 1854 after being illegally taken out of the newly established Greek state. Artifacts from the site can also be found in Berlin and in private German collections, and even in Boston in the United States.

Yet the place where Oedipus is fabled to have grown up and Agamemnon to have settled prisoners from Troy to guard the road from Mycenae to Argos has been yielding new treasures over the past seven years that the Culture Ministry has been carrying out excavations of the ancient city, under the supervision of Dr Elena Korka, confirming the city's power and status.

Korka remembers the discovery in 1984 - when she was a young...