When the German Archaeological Institute opened its Athens department in 1874, it was only the institute's second branch, after Rome, and only the second foreign archaeological school in Athens, after the French had arrived first. Part of the operation was established on 17 March 1872 and formally inaugurated on 9 December 1874. Today it is one of nineteen foreign archaeological institutes working in the city, an extraordinary concentration of scholarship drawn to a single place by the density of the past beneath it. From its founding, the Athens department did more than dig for itself. It supported and promoted the work of German and Greek scientists alike, weaving itself into the wider community of researchers who pass through Athens, some for a season, some for a lifetime.

Behind the institute's classical facade is a working archive that few outsiders ever see in full. Its library holds some 80,000 volumes. Its photographic collection is even more remarkable: more than 140,000 negatives, a visual record of Greek antiquity assembled over generations and consulted by scholars from around the world. Since 1876 the institute has published its journal, the Mitteilungen of the Athens department, every year without interruption, alongside a steady stream of monographs and excavation reports. For an archaeologist working anywhere in Greece, the institute's photographs and publications are not a convenience but a foundation, a deep memory of what has been found, where, and in what condition.

The institute's spade has reached nearly every corner of Greece. It has worked the Ionian Islands at Leukas and Ithaca, Boeotia at Orchomenos and Thebes, Attica at Menidi and Eleusis, and Laconia at Amyklai. Some of its most enduring projects are still running. At Olympia, the sanctuary where the ancient Games were held, German teams have been excavating since 1875, an unbroken effort approaching a hundred and fifty years. They dig at Tiryns in the Argolid, at Kalapodi in Boeotia, at the Heraion of Samos, and in Athens itself at the Kerameikos, the ancient cemetery whose grave monuments and burial roads they have steadily uncovered. Until the institute founded a separate Istanbul department in 1929, the Athens office handled fieldwork stretching even into western Asia Minor.

The institute's history can be read through the scholars who led it. Otto Luders opened the directorship in 1872. Wilhelm Dorpfeld, who had helped design the very building, ran the department from 1887 to 1912, bridging Schliemann's heroic age of treasure-hunting and the more careful, stratigraphic archaeology that followed. Georg Karo led it through the upheavals of two separate terms; Ernst Buschor, Emil Kunze, and Helmut Kyrieleis carried it through the twentieth century. Since 2014 the director has been Katja Sporn. Across all those names runs a single continuity: a building paid for by the most famous excavator of them all, still standing in the heart of Athens, still sending archaeologists out into the Greek countryside to find what the centuries buried.