John V. Luce passed away

John V. Luce passed away on 12 February at the age of 90. He will be remembered in the world of Aegean archaeology for his End of Atlantis (1976), which sold more than half a million copies, where he argued for the identification of Crete with Plato’s Atlantis. An advocate of the reality of Homeric topography, he was an unwavering believer that the veracity of Homer’s landscapes in Troy and Ithaca have been vindicated by archaeology (Homer’s Landscapes, 1998).

In the 1980s he put forward the idea of the foundation of an Irish Institute at Athens, which came to fruition ten years later. He was made a patron of the IIHSA, continued to be a supporter, and recently co-edited the IIHSA volume The Lure of Greece, Irish involvement in Greek culture, literature, history and politics (2007).