In the summer of 1981, a group of local men, angered by the "foreign women" who had claimed the beach, set fire to The Sappho House. The olive press burned. The notebooks turned to ash. The driftwood idols cracked like bones.
Sullivan arrived not as an archaeologist, but as a journalist and amateur artist. She rented a dilapidated stone house in the village of Eressos (Sappho’s birthplace) and began writing fierce, unflinching dispatches for The Manchester Guardian about the refugee crisis. But soon, her attention turned underground—literally. idol of lesbos margo sullivan
"Those idols are real," she said. "Not real in the sense of being 2,500 years old. But real in the sense that they carry the truth of Lesbos—the truth of women loving women, of poets defying empires, of islanders who sing when they should weep. I carved them. I buried them. I dug them up. And in that act, I became an archaeologist of the soul." In the summer of 1981, a group of