The Early Botanical Exploration of Greece

Abstract

An account is given of botanical exploration and explorers of Greece in its present-day boundaries, from antiquity to the end of the 19th Century. Our admittedly fragmentary knowledge of the herb lore and botanical skills of the ancients (Theophrastos, Dioskourides) shows Greece to be the cradle of modern botanical science. For early European botanists, visiting Greece became a pilgrimage to the pristine sources of their science. Modern investigation, starting in the 16th Century, concentrated almost exclusively on the few areas still under Venetian control, in particular Crete. When Crete fell to the Turks, exploration came to a halt. Few travellers ventured into the Ottoman Empire, including its Greek parts: the French Tournefort (1700-1702), Olivier and Bruguiere (1792-1798), and Dumont d’Urville (1819) who, at the end of the Greek liberation war, were followed by Bory (1829); and the Englishman Sibthorp (1786-1787, 1794-1795). After 1832, the independent Greek Kingdom was wide open to visiting botanists, often of German origin, and hosted resident ones among whom Heldreich is prominent alongside with the first modern Greek plant scientist, Orphanides. Meanwhile some islands and northern Greeke (Epirus, Macedonia, and Thrace), still under the Turkish yoke and therefore of difficult access, were being explored by botanical pioneers such as Grisebach (1839), Formanek (1889-1899), and a few others. To close the period, Halacsy between 1900 and 1904 published the first Greek national Flora, just about to be relayed by Phitos & al.’s incipient Flora hellenica.