ATHENS – Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum for 41 years before retiring, member of the Athens Academy and outstanding classical archaeologist, has died aged 81.

Delivorrias had been hospitalized since Holy Thursday with respiratory issues, and also underwent a heart operation.

Born in 1937, he studied archaeology and history at the Universities of Athens and Thessaloniki, and took a graduate degree at Freiburg University. He served in the Archaeological Service from 1965 to 1969, when he resigned to study archaeology on scholarship at Tubingen University to get a PhD. He also had post-doctorate studies in the Sorbonne.

He returned to the Archaeological Service, serving in Attica, Patra, and Sparti posts and at the National Archaeological Museum, before becoming director of the Benaki Museum in 1973, and had excavated inThrace, in Plato?s Academy, south of the Acropolis, in Vravrona, in Achaia, Sparti and Laconia.

He was also elected professor of art history at the University of Athens, where he taught from 1992 to 2005, and had published several monographs, as well as two volumes on museology.

Delivorrias had been invited or provided with scholarships to study in London, Munich, Berlin and the United States, and was elected member of three other Academies besides Athens’. He was an honorary doctor of the Universities of Aegean, Thrace and Thessaloniki.

He also created the Museum of Islamic Art and the Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghikas Museum, based in the late artist?s home in Athens, and oversaw 130 major Greek exhibitions in Greece and 39 abroad as director of the Benaki Museum.