Klaus Tuchelt

Klaus Tuchelt (born April 25, 1931 in Dessau , † September 21, 2001 in Didim ) was a German classical archaeologist who was particularly associated with the excavations of the ancient Greek sanctuary of Didyma .

Life

Klaus Tuchelt passed his Abitur in 1949 and in the same year began studying classical archeology and classical philology at the University of Halle , where Herbert Koch became his first important teacher. Because of the political situation in eastern Germany, Tuchelt moved to the Free University of Berlin in 1951 , where Friedrich Wilhelm Goethert was teaching at the time . In 1953 he went to the University of Munich , where Ernst Buschor was to become his most influential academic teacher. As early as 1956, Tuchelt received his doctorate from Buschor with a thesis on animal vessels in the shape of a head and protome .

Six months followed, during which he worked for the Athens Department of the German Archaeological Institute in the library and the photo library and then worked with a further contract at the headquarters in Berlin. This was followed by a brief activity for the Antikensammlung in West Berlin, where he was involved in bringing the ancient artifacts from the Schloss Celle artifact warehouse back to Berlin. In 1957/58 he received a travel grant from the German Archaeological Institute , with the help of which he could travel to Italy , Egypt , Greece , Turkey and the Levant . It was here that close friendships were formed with fellow fellows Wolfgang Binsfeld , Heinz Cüppers , Lore Frey-Asche , Otto-Herman Frey and Helmut Schläger that would last for the rest of his life . Following a character trait of Tuchelt, despite close friendship, they addressed each other as “you” for the rest of their lives. As part of the scholarship, Tuchelt was able to take part in an archaeological excavation in Pergamon for the first time in 1957.

Up until the time of his scholarship, Tuchelt had not yet been archaeologically fixed on a particular room that particularly interested him. In 1958 he was employed as a consultant at the Istanbul Department of the German Archaeological Institute . Through the mediation of the then second director Heinz Luschey , Tuchelt began to deal more and more with Turkey and the archeology there. This circumstance was probably initiated by the first director of the Istanbul department, Kurt Bittel , who subsequently became a kind of father figure for Tuchelt. Bittel recognized Tuchelt's inclinations and skills and promoted them sustainably.

In 1962, Tuchelt came to Didyma for the first time . After 1924, excavations were resumed for the first time for a ten-day but extremely successful campaign. While the team around Heinrich Drerup and his assistant Friedrich Hiller dug inside the temple and was able to prove the holy source there, the team around Rudolf Naumann and Tuchelt dug outside the temple and discovered the remains of an archaic hall. In 1964, Tuchelt moved to the University of Mainz as Frank Brommer's assistant , where he completed his habilitation with a thesis on the subject of Didyma's archaic sculptures. Contributions to early Greek sculpture in Asia Minor .

In 1969 he went back to Istanbul, now as the second director of the department. Since it seemed incompatible with this task to hold events in Mainz every semester, he let his Venia legendi expire and from now on devoted himself entirely to work for the German Archaeological Institute. The following years were the most productive of his career. Tuchelt dealt with the topography, with the early monuments of the Roman era in Asia Minor and last but not least with the epigraphic evidence. Since 1978 he has devoted himself almost exclusively to the excavation in Didyma, where he not only led the implementation, but also the planning, organization and coordination.

In 1981 he was appointed first director at the headquarters of the German Archaeological Institute in Berlin, where he was the deputy of President Edmund Buchner , then of Helmut Kyrieleis . Furthermore, he devoted himself to the excavation in Didyma, to which he remained connected as excavation manager even after retiring in 1996. Volume 46 of the Istanbul Mitteilungen was dedicated to Tuchelt; Haluk Abbasoğlu spoke about the luck that not only an archaeologist can have with an excavation site, but also about the luck that, as in this case, an excavation site had with its excavator. Tuchelt died at the excavation site in 2001 at the age of 70. After news of his death at the excavation site around noon, work was stopped. The great respect that Tuchelt enjoyed was shown by the fact that the excavation workers did not go home, but instead gathered in the yard of the excavation house, stayed there for several hours and finally carried the deceased out of the house themselves. Tuchelt was finally buried in the Zehlendorf forest cemetery in Berlin.

Tuchelt was not only Didyma's excavator and, through his research, increased our knowledge of one of the most important sanctuaries in the ancient Greek world. Rather, he also took care of the processing of old excavation results and, above all, in his later years devoted himself to the preservation and conservation of the sites already excavated. Since the late 1980s, but especially since the 1990s, the excavations have increasingly focused on historical questions, and Tuchelt tried to record the archaeological results in a historical context. As an excavator in Didyma, he was the true successor of Theodor Wiegand .

Fonts

• Animal vessels in head and protome shape. Investigations into the history of forms of animal-shaped casting vessels . Mann, Berlin 1962 ( Istanbul Research , Volume 22).
• Didyma's archaic sculptures. Contributions to early Greek sculpture in Asia Minor . Mann, Berlin 1970, ISBN 3-7861-2036-6 ( Istanbul Research , Volume 27).
• Preparatory work for a topography of Didyma. An examination of the inscribed and archaeological evidence . Wasmuth, Tübingen 1973 ( Istanbuler Mitteilungen . Supplement 9).
• Early monuments of Rome in Asia Minor. Contributions to the archaeological tradition from the time of the Republic and Augustus . Volume 1: Roma and Promagistrates. Wasmuth, Tübingen 1979, ISBN 3-8030-1722-X ( Istanbuler Mitteilungen . Supplement 23).
• Branchidai - Didyma. History, excavation and rediscovery of an ancient sanctuary from 1765 to 1990 . von Zabern, Mainz 1991, ISBN 3-8053-1316-0 ( Zabern's illustrated books on archeology , volume 3; special issues on the ancient world ).

literature

• Klaus Dornisch: In memoriam Klaus Tuchelt. In: Nürnberger Blätter zur Archäologie 17, 2000/01, pp. 197–198.
• Anneliese Peschlow-Bindokat : In memoriam Klaus Tuchelt. In: Istanbuler Mitteilungen 52, 2002, pp. 7–8.
• Thomas G. Schattner : In Memoriam Klaus Tuchelt . In: Antike Welt 32, 2001, pp. 665–666.

Web links

• Christmas crib from Istanbul, designed by Klaus Tuchelt

Individual evidence

1. ^ Hans-Jürgen Mende: Lexicon of Berlin burial places . Pharus-Plan, Berlin 2018, ISBN 978-3-86514-206-1 , p. 640.