History of the Archives Service

The first efforts to maintain diplomatic archives in Greece began one year after the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence. The first Greek Constitution of January 1822, known as the Epidavros Constitution, already envisaged the creation of the 'Supreme Secretary of State', to whom was assigned not only direct responsibility for the country's foreign relations, but also the collecting and safe-keeping of diplomatic documents. In April 1833, King Otto issued a royal decree aimed at the reconstruction of the state, making radical changes in almost all the basic institutions. This decree provided, amongst other things, for the foundation of an Archives Section as part of the newly constituted 'Secretariat of Foreign Affairs'.

Until 1863, the system, by which the archives were organised, remained essentially the same. It was in that year that the change of the name of the Secretariat to 'Ministry of Foreign Affairs', as a result of a decision taken by the Second General National Assembly, gave rise to the need to separate and reorganize the individual services of the Ministry in the light of the particular objectives of each.

It was not until 1910, however, that an Archive Service with specific responsibilities and tasks was founded within the MFA under the jurisdiction of the General Director of Political Affairs. At the same period the staff of the Archive Service consisted of a director, two assistants and two archivists. In the years 1910-1920, a major effort was made to classify the archive systematically, in order to make it functional and accessible to historians and researchers. However, apart from the Ministry's employees, only specific scholars were allowed access to diplomatic documents for research purposes, after they had first obtained permission from the Ministry. It was during this period, and upon the request of the prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, that permission to study the files in the Historical Archive was granted to two French historians, Edouard Driault and Michel Lheritier, who five years later published the first diplomatic history of modern Greece.

During the German Occupation (1941-1944) the operation of the Foreign Ministry, and by extension of all its Services, was suspended, and access to the archives was strictly forbidden. After the liberation of Greece the record groups were in complete disarray: it became clear that the collection had been partly ransacked and selectively destroyed. Some of the files had been carried off when the Occupation forces departed for Germany, while a number of documents had been removed and destroyed, as was evident from the gaps found in the chronological sequence of the record groups when they were returned in sacks by the American army. The task of reclassifying the archives began in 1945 and was completed five years later.

In 1959, a royal decree (426/30.11.1959) defined the procedure by which private individuals and historians would be allowed access to the files of the MFA. The first article of this decree determined that diplomatic documents should remain classified for a fifty-year period. Although the Foreign Ministry files became available to scholars in 1959, research continued to be at a rudimentary level in terms of means and organisation of material, and also of the number of researchers who showed interest in the respective files. It was only after 1994 that significant progress in the reorganisation and modernisation of the Directorate of Archives in all respects has been achieved, with the creation of new departments, the adoption of sophisticated technological techniques for classifying and storing the archive collections and the devising and implementation of important research programmes.

This significant progress can, to a large extent, be attributed to the re-establishment and upgrading of the Directorate of Archives, which, according to the Statute of the Hellenic Ministry of Foreign Affairs of 1998, was renamed as the Service of Historical Archives. The various legislative decrees that followed, aimed at harmonizing the way in which the Service was organized and operated with the demands of the new technologies and modern research methods. By adding the term “Diplomatic” to its title (art. 8, Law 2.949/2001), the Service provided an indication of its new character for the 21st century. Following the rapid progress achieved in this period, the Service of Diplomatic and Historical Archives is now in a position to make a substantial contribution not only to recording Greek diplomatic history, but also to influencing its formulation.