Georg Heinrich Karo (11 January 1872 – 12 November 1963) was a German archaeologist, known for his research into the Mycenaean and Etruscan cultures. He was twice director of the German Archaeological Institute at Athens (DAI), in which capacity he excavated the Mycenaean site of Tiryns and the Temple of Artemis on Corfu. A colleague of Wilhelm Dörpfeld, who had worked with Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, Karo published the findings from Schliemann's excavations of Grave Circle A at Mycenae, a work considered his greatest contribution to scholarship.
Initially educated in philology, Karo became interested in archaeology as a student of Georg Loeschcke at the University of Bonn. Following his receipt of his doctorate from Bonn in 1896, Karo travelled widely in the Mediterranean region, developing interests in Minoan civilisation, the Etruscans and on ancient biblical commentaries. He taught briefly at Bonn between 1902 and 1905, before moving to the DAI in Athens as Dörpfeld's deputy. Known for his urbane manner and fluency in several languages, he became well connected in the international circles of Greek archaeology, and maintained the favour of both the Greek and the German royal families. His outspoken German nationalism led to his dismissal from the DAI in 1916: he spent some time in the Ottoman Empire, where he worked to conserve cultural heritage and was linked with various efforts to appropriate ancient artefacts and bring them to Germany.
Karo's views made him unpopular with the Entente-backed government that ruled in Greece after the First World War, and he took an academic post at the University of Halle, which he held until 1930. That year, he returned to Athens as director of the DAI. Although an early supporter of the Nazi government of Germany, Karo was forced from his post in 1936 by antisemitism against his Jewish ancestry. In 1939, he fled to the United States, supported by American associates including Carl Blegen and Bert Hodge Hill, and obtained a series of visiting professorships at the University of Cincinnati, Oberlin College and Claremont Colleges. However, he was also accused of collaborating with the Nazi regime: though no evidence for this allegation was proven, he was denied US citizenship and listed as an "Enemy Alien". He returned to Germany in 1952, and became an honorary professor at the University of Freiburg.
Early life
Georg Heinrich Karo was born in the Palazzo Barbaro, Venice. His father, Moritz, the son of a rabbi from Königsberg, had built up a substantial fortune as a merchant in Berlin and served as honorary consul to Austria-Hungary. His mother, Helene Kuh, was Moritz's second wife and a native of Vienna. Both of Karo's parents were non-practising Jews, and baptised their children as Evangelical Protestant Christians; Karo remained a practising Protestant throughout his life. Karo lived in Berlin until the age of six, when his father, having lost his job due to illness, moved the family to Florence, where Karo spent the remainder his childhood. Until 1885, Karo was educated by private tutors in Florence, including Carl Schuchhardt, later known as a pioneer of prehistoric archaeology in Germany. Thereafter, he attended the Berthold-Gymnasium in Freiburg, from which he graduated on 30 July 1890.
In the same year, he began studying history, philosophy and archaeology at the University of Munich, under the art historian Heinrich Wölfflin and the philologists Wilhelm von Christ and Ludwig Traube. He initially specialised in philology, later writing in his memoirs that he found archaeology "completely foreign" and that he "only embarrassed himself" when attempting it. At the beginning of the 1892 winter term, he moved to the University of Bonn, where he studied under the classicist Franz Bücheler and the philologist Hermann Usener, but focused his studies in archaeology under Georg Loeschcke. Loeschcke held that the tradition of classical art should be traced into the Minoan and Mycenaean cultures of the second millenniumBCE: Karo received his doctorate under him in 1896, with a thesis entitled ('Questions on the Art of Most Ancient Vase Painting').