Return of stolen antiquities puts a WWII hero in the spotlight

Nikolaos Platon was known for never exaggerating, however wild his archaeological adventures may have seemed. Slight and modest, with a PhD from Paris, he was one of the unlikely heroes of occupied Greece in World War II, defending the country's monuments at any cost.

Interest in his accomplishments has been revived by the recent return to Greece of 26 ancient relics stolen from Crete in WWII. The story of their homecoming began a decade ago, when experts at the University of Graz in Austria launched a project to identify the provenance of hundreds of antiquities in the institution's possession. They found that part of the collection had been illegally removed from the Stratigraphic Museum and Villa Ariadne in Knossos in 1941.

The objects, including clay vessels, fragments of idols and a bone dress pin, were returned to a Greek Culture Ministry representative in a...