George Ewart Bean

Who is George Ewart Bean?

George Ewart Bean was an English archaeologist and writer who specialized in classical Turkey. His father William Jackson Bean was a botanist, author, and curator of Kew Gardens. Bean was educated at St Paul's School, London and Pembroke College, Cambridge. He graduated in 1923 and returned to St Paul's to teach ancient Greek.

In the 1930s, he organized summer school trips to the Aegean coast of Turkey. In 1943, in the middle of World War II, he was recruited by the British Council to teach English in Izmir. Several years later, he helped to set up the archaeology department at the University of Istanbul. He stayed on in Istanbul, teaching classics at the university for 24 years.

Between 1943 and 1971, Bean travelled extensively in rural Turkey in order to discover and record its classical remains. Over the years, he became a well-known and respected figure in the countryside. The publisher Ernest Benn commissioned him to write a series of archaeological guidebooks on the region. The result was a series of four books describing the classical archaeology of Turkey. These are:

Aegean Turkey

Turkey beyond the Maeander

Turkey's Southern Shore

Lycian Turkey

He was a friend of the Oxford-educated classicist Terence Mitford, and together they undertook numerous journeys into the Turkish interior. They also wrote a book together, titled Journeys into Rough Cilicia.