Why I support the DAAD-Stiftung
Jordan/DAAD
Dr. Maria Trumpf-Lyritzaki together with another DAAD-Stiftung sponsor and several scholarship recipients.
Dr. Maria Trumpf Lyritzaki has supported Greek students of Archaeology since 2012 by financing a scholarship which enables them to complete a research stay in Germany. She explains:
“Together with the DAAD-Stiftung, I help young academics from my home country because it’s important to me that German archaeology maintains its traditional place in the education of Greek archaeologists. With my scholarship, I wish to provide young, highly qualified researchers the opportunity to conduct research at a German university for one year. In this way, I can contribute to strengthening efforts to promote German-Greek exchange in the field of cultural studies.”
Life and Career of our Sponsor:
Dr. Maria Trumpf-Lyritzaki attended the classical secondary school in her home town of Heraklion, Crete, where she graduated in 1952. As a student of Greek Language, Literature, History and Archaeology, she earned her diploma from the University of Athens in 1957. Much of her childhood and youth were influenced by the horror and hardship caused by the German attack and harsh occupation of her home country. Even in Athens during the 1950s, the university was acutely underfunded, and students had very little to live on and suffered from a lack of study materials.
In 1958, she enrolled at the University of Bonn where she earned her doctorate under Ernst Longlotz in 1964 with the dissertation “Greek Figural Vases of the Rich Style and Late Classical Era”. Her dissertation was published by H. Bouvier & Co. in Bonn in 1969 as volume 73 of an essay series on art, music and literary studies. It continues to be a reference work for the particular type of Attic vases, produced after the last red-figure painted vases and prior to the Hellenistic Tanagra figurines, which were also of Attic provenance. The most beautiful vases of this type are displayed at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, luxurious specimens with rich polychromy and gilding, such as the famous Phanagoria Sphinx. Maria Trumpf-Lyritzaki’s later academic accomplishments include an extensive article titled “Glocke” in the Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum, vol. XI, 1979, pp. 164-192.
She has been married since 1959 to the German diplomat Dr. Jürgen Trumpf who studied at the University of Athens for one year on a DAAD scholarship in 1954/55. In view of their wartime experiences during their youth, the couple were committed to unity among the peoples of Europe in the European Union throughout their professional and private lives. In this spirit and, above all, out of a commitment to social responsibility, Dr. Maria Trumpf-Lyritzaki established an annual scholarship at the DAAD-Stiftung in 2011 which supports prospective archaeologists in Greece to this day.
