A legend of the world’s archaeology
Archeologist Viktor Sarianidi, the “poet of archeology”, gained international recognition for his excavation work in Afghanistan, where he discovered the ancient necropolis and its treasure, Tilly Tepe, and Turkmenistan. A legend in world archeology, the Greek
Pontian of Tashkent left an indelible imprint on the history of the excavations.
He was born in Tashkent on September 23, 1929, to Pontian parents who had been transferred from Yalta to Uzbekistan because of the “White Army” leaving the peninsula and the civil war in at-the-time Russia that endangered the lives of residents of the Greek region of the Black Sea. So the family moved to the Uzbek capital where there was a small Greek community from the Tsarist period.
After school, Viktor studied at the Central Asian State University in Tashkent, where he graduated in 1952, and, in 1961, he received a Master of Near and Middle Eastern Archeology from the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow.
As a student, he had been involved in archaeological missions since 1947-48, and in the mid-1950s he moved to Moscow and became a Fellow of the Institute of History of Material Culture (now the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences), where he continued his studies and specialized in Middle Eastern Archeology.
