Bonds of friendship formed at Pylos archaeological dig

Maria Zacharopoulou spent hours as a young girl on her balcony watching American and Greek archaeologists hard at work in the building next to her family home in the village of Hora in Messinia, in the southwestern Peloponnese. She was awed and intrigued by the discoveries they were making in local archaeological digs and dreamed of one day becoming a part of their team.

"I grew up with the Palace of Nestor and the Hora Museum as part of my day-to-day existence," she tells Kathimerini today. Such proximity to history led her to study archaeology and, several years later, to realize her childhood dream by joining the University of Cincinnati excavations in Messinia in May 2018. Archaeologists there recently uncovered two unpillaged 15th century BC beehive tombs and in 2015 had discovered one of the most important prehistoric burial monuments ever found on mainland Greece, the...