Greek archaeologist Nikos Stampolidis

The balcony of Nikos Stampolidis's third-floor apartment in the historic centre of Athens is barely wide enough for two chairs, yet it overlooks some of Europe's most cherished architectural monuments.

A line of honey-hued classical columns rising above a solid wall of rock is part of the Parthenon temple. Cut into the slope below are the tiers of the theatre of Dionysus, where western drama began. In the distance, past a scattering of pines and cypresses, stands a marble memorial to Philopappos, a wealthy resident of Athens in Roman times. Close by, across a pedestrian street, looms the gleaming modernist bulk of the Acropolis museum, buzzing with visitors on a spring Sunday afternoon.

Stampolidis, 64, one of Greece's leading archaeologists, divides his time between teaching at the University of Crete, excavating the ancient city of Eleutherna on the island and running the Museum of Cycladic Art, a private Athens foundation with a unique collection of prehistoric marble idols.

"I love to be in the heart of the city and see people moving among the antiquities and filing into the Acropolis museum," he says. "The romantic view of abandoned ruins is fine sometimes, at sunset perhaps . . . But antiquities are proof of human activity and I am always aware of the people who built them."

Stampolidis bought the apartment 10 years ago, moving from a family home a stone's throw away in the Plaka neighbourhood, where he still keeps part of his library, which is looked after by his sister. In Crete, he lives near the university campus in a house belonging to another sister.

"It was a typical 1950s Athens apartment, well built but with small rooms and it had been badly neglected," he says, showing me around his home. "I had walls torn down to open up the space and bring in as much light as possible. I put in a picture window so I could sit on the sofa and look up at the Acropolis . . . I couldn't enlarge the balcony because of strict building regulations."

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Professionally, Stampolidis works with objects going back four millennia, yet there are no ancient artefacts on display. The living area is more reminiscent of Istanbul than Athens, with polished wood floors strewn with brightly coloured kilims - flat-weave Turkish rugs - in floral patterns, and old-fashioned armchairs and a sofa all upholstered in ivory-coloured fabric. Two tall oil paintings of the same pomegranate tree, one with red fruit glimmering on a dark wintry background and the other with bright summer foliage, hang on opposite walls.

Stampolidis points out designs from ancient times channelled by a contemporary Athenian craftsman: a bowl-shaped metal lamp and a set of dining-table chairs based on domestic furniture as depicted in classical vase-paintings. Similarly, a 19th-century tapestry from Armenia, showing a hunting scene woven in a circular pattern, reminds him of early Greek decorative metalwork. "Continuity is important . . . I wish the politicians who run the culture ministry and the [state] archaeological service and oversee our work would understand that," Stampolidis says. "They stay for two to three years at the most but it takes 30 years of sustained effort to create a museum . . . A large part of that achievement is making sure you have brought on board a new generation of archaeologists and museologists."

One of the few personal items on view is a watercolour of a storm heading for the 17th-century Venetian lighthouse guarding the harbour in Hania, the Cretan city where Stampolidis was born. It was a gift from Dolly Goulandris, who founded the Cycladic museum after the death of her shipowner husband to put their joint collection on public display.

It took Goulandris four years to persuade Stampolidis to accept the post of director in 1996; he did so on condition that he could make radical changes to prevent it becoming a fossilised repository of beautiful but irrelevant objects. "She was a determined and dedicated collector, I had a huge admiration for her and she became a great friend," he says. "But the museum had to develop."

Stampolidis and his team pioneered educational programmes for young visitors and exhibitions on ancient Greek life, which often alternate with contemporary art shows. Eros, a blockbuster exhibition on love and sexual desire in Greek antiquity, put the museum on the international map. The Cycladic museum saw a 16 per cent increase in visitors between 2010 and 2014, and a jump of more than 80 per cent in the first quarter this year, on the back of two popular temporary exhibitions.

"The crisis has helped push up the numbers," Stampolidis explains. "Museums are a relatively inexpensive form of entertainment . . . and I think Greeks are somehow reassured in these difficult times by revisiting the artistic achievements of their ancestors."

The youngest of five children, Stampolidis grew up in Hania. His parents were shipped from Istanbul to Crete in the forced exchange of minority populations after a Greek military defeat in Turkey in 1922. His father worked as a house painter, later acquiring a caique, a commercial fishing boat.

As a teenager, he travelled round the island by bus and on foot, exploring archaeological sites and practising English by guiding visitors. He took a degree in history and archaeology at Thessaloniki university, then won a German government scholarship for a PhD at the University of Bonn. After his doctorate he turned down research posts in Germany and the US, preferring to join the department of history and archaeology at the newly founded University of Crete. He was later given permission to excavate at Eleutherna in the foothills of Mount Ida. While digging on a slope lined with terraces for olive trees, Stampolidis and his students unearthed a city cemetery with burials dating from the 10th to 6th centuries BC.

One exceptional cremation stood out. A wealthy, important man, judging by the bones of goats, cattle and an ox slaughtered for his burial, was immolated on a pyre of logs. On one side were the bones of a 40-year-old man whose throat had been cut. Next to him was a broken iron knife. His head was missing, perhaps tossed on the fire. The execution was dated to about 700BC. This was the period, some five centuries after the Trojan war, when Homer's epic poems were written down. Stampolidis' find vividly recalls "The Iliad", where Achilles buries his friend Patroclus on a funeral pyre after slitting the throats of "twelve noble sons of great-hearted Trojans" in revenge for his death.

"The burial was exceptional but it's not really surprising," Stampolidis says. "Why shouldn't Homer's descriptions of the Trojan war be drawn from contemporary life? Ancient philosophers, like modern scholars, argued about whether Homer was writing 'truth' or mythology. Here we have an answer."

The remains of the ritual execution, and a documentary recreating it, will be the centrepiece of a museum at Eleutherna, due to open in 2016. In a small study off the living area, decorated with an icon of the Virgin Mary - a gift from nuns at a Cretan Orthodox convent that Stampolidis and his department helped to refurbish - he flips through pictures of the still-empty museum. An unassuming grey concrete building, it is equipped with conference facilities, and an outdoor amphitheatre, with an eye-catching backdrop of Mount Ida rising above a silver-grey sea of olive groves.

He expects Eleutherna to attract several hundred thousand visitors a year. "Culture, education and tourism, they're a triangle that can be made to spin faster . . . museums have come closer in the past 15 years to what they should be, houses for all the muses where you can spend time in a civilised way. But we can still do much more."

Kerin Hope is the FT's Athens correspondent

Photographs: Petros Efstathiadis

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