Greek Archaeological Service

The Greek Archaeological Service (Greek: Αρχαιολογική Υπηρεσία, romanised: Archaiologikí Ypiresía) is a state service, under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Culture, responsible for the oversight of all archaeological excavations, museums and the country's archaeological heritage in general.

The Greek Archaeological Service is the oldest such institution in Europe: it was founded in 1833, on the back of state efforts to regulate antiquities that had been ongoing since at least 1825, and given its legal basis in 1834. Its officers were known as "ephors" for most of its history, and have included some of Greece's foremost archaeologists, including Christos Tsountas, Valerios Stais, and Semni Karouzou. Its directors, originally under the title of "Ephor General", have included Kyriakos Pittakis, Panagiotis Kavvadias and Spyridon Marinatos, and have been influential both in the excavation and conservation of Greek antiquities and in the shaping of archaeological law.

Initially a small department, usually comprising only the Ephor General, the Archaeological Service gradually expanded over the second half of the nineteenth century. Panagiotis Efstratiadis began the process of recruiting additional archaeologists and expanding the service's operations outside Athens, while Panagiotis Kavvadias expanded its numbers further and instituted a competitive system of examination for prospective ephors. The service's prestige declined following the ousting of Kavvadias in 1909, though its operations expanded to include a museum of Byzantine archaeology and via the archaeological law of 1932, which gave it authority to issue excavation permits to Greece's foreign archaeological institutes. Under the dictatorial prime minister Ioannis Metaxas and the service's director Spyridon Marinatos, legislation passed in 1939 banned women from joining the Archaeological Service or serving as the directors of museums and regional ephorates. This ban was overturned in 1959 by John Papadimitriou, who secured additional funding and political independence for the service.

The Archaeological Service was again reorganised in 1982, following Marinatos's return to the directorship under the Regime of the Colonels: this reform ended the use of the title of "ephor" for archaeological officials. In 2014, it was again reformed to amalgamate the ephorates of prehistoric and classical archaeology with those of Byzantine and later archaeology, creating a single regional unit for each area of Greece.