Gabriel Zuchtreigel, Director of Pompeii: Archaeology is the most democratic form of history

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1:16Hello, I'm Michael Barclay, BBC presenter, and this is the interview from the BBC World Service. The best conversations coming out of the BBC. People shaping our world from all over the world. Today we are spending trivians on war and peanuts on peace. Wind power in the United States has been subsidized for 33 years. Isn't that enough? Solar for 25 years, that's enough. I don't have army. I don't have missile rockets. I have my body. I have my voice. I love singing and so my goal was always to do better and better at it. I was still in an induced coma in hospital when the world was defining me.

1:56For this interview, I met Gabriel Zugtriegel, director of one of the world's most important archaeological sites, Pompeii in southern Italy, the ancient Roman city that was buried in ash and pumice when nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 79. You're going to hear about the power of archaeology to teach us about our past in the way that written records cannot. How did enslaved people live? How did, you know, prostitutes live? How did the poor live? How did their apartments and houses look? That's something where the written sources are really, really scarce and tell us very little. But in Pompeii, you get everything.

2:42And so you can try to reconstruct the society as a whole and also make some assumptions on the numbers and the social stratification. In this conversation, Gabriel Zuchtregel also tells me about the lengths people will go to steal artefacts from Pompey, as well as the rumoured curse that sits upon anyone who does so, and he calls upon the British Museum to consider returning the contested Elgin marbles to Greece. Born in Germany and only 44 years old, his appointment as Pompey's director in 2021 was controversial, with critics claiming he did not have enough experience for such a high-profile role.

3:28But under his leadership, ongoing excavations have unearthed a number of significant finds. Welcome to the interview from the BBC World Service with Gabriel Zuchtriegel. archaeology has this focus on the material evidence so it's in a way more democratic because the texts often are written by the powerful and they represent their idea of how things should be remembered let's say Julius Caesar writes about the the wars he conducted but then you see the the archaeological record and this is really the case in Pompeii Mount Vesuvius did not make any difference between the wealthy and the poor and the stables and workshops and the rich wealthy houses of the town with their beautiful paintings.

4:23And so you get the whole picture and that fascinated me always. You're very careful, Gabriel, to point out that it's the rich who tend to be remembered in history because they leave behind buildings, objects, documents. But something you're anxious to discover is how the less privileged people of Pompeii live too. And that's where Pompeii really helps us a lot. How did enslaved people live? Where did they sleep? How did they spend their days? How did, you know, prostitutes live? How did the poor live? How did their apartments and houses look? And that's something where the written sources are really, really scarce and tell us very little.

5:13But in Pompeii, you get everything. And so you can try to reconstruct the society as a whole and also make some assumptions on the numbers and the social stratification. and what's interesting you can see also I learned in university that the ancients had no middle class that that was an idea totally modern because we archaeologists usually come from middle class backgrounds so that's an invention of projection right but actually if you look at Pompeii you can see that there is something like a middle class houses that are not so big maybe but have a lot of paintings and you can see both the ambition to rise socially but also the fear of declining and and so i think it was a very dynamic and um yeah a highly complex society and that's that's really interesting and we found a slave room a few years ago which was really uh touching and interesting, three beds in a very, very small room of 16 square meters, no wall decoration, no floor, just earth, rats, mice there infesting the living spaces, which were at the same time a depot for amphoras.

6:43And so you really get very close to the daily experience of these people. while a student you were a tour guide at berlin's pergamon museum where you noticed something that you've called collector syndrome well yeah it's the idea that you come to a place with some kind of list you have to see pompeii you have to see the louvre you have to see to see yeah and and then you've been there and that's it and i thought this was really a pity and we should work on being really present and maybe then it's not so much you know the the the mona lisa or whatever but maybe you discover something you didn't expect and that's maybe much more important for your visit than the great artwork that everybody talks about just ticking them off on a list there's also a problem to do with people taking the collection of antiques a bit far in terms of people actually wanting to pick things up, steal things, nick things.

7:45You've had that at Pompeii. We have that. We get basically every month a few letters and sendings where people send back things they took from Pompeii, sometimes years or decades ago. Often it's, you know, small stones or objects that have no particular value, but it's the idea of taking something, of owning something. And then after a while there is an afterthought and there's also a legend about a curse lying on everyone who takes something from Pompeii. And the interesting fact is that they often write about this and so I often get letters where people write, I'm sorry I took this years ago, but they tell you I'm sorry I want to give it back And I have experienced a number of tragedies.

8:43Sometimes they talk about losing their jobs and also cancer, divorce. And the fact that they attribute this to something they've done and then realized it's not okay because Pompeii should be for everybody and should be protected. And so I want to repair it. So don't take away anything from Pompeii. We have also video surveillance. So it's also a criminal offence. You explain how illegal looting, forgery and illegal art dealing have been occurring over the generations in Pompeii. But it's extraordinary the lengths that some go to, isn't it? Making tiny tunnels? Making tunnels from their basement in their private house, which was built on a Roman villa.

9:31And so these people had one under their basement and they started building a network of tunnels, which eventually went below neighboring houses too. And so very sadly looted this sign. They cut off frescoes from the walls and took objects. It's part of a worldwide phenomenon, unfortunately. And we are very active to combat this, but there are still other cases. Unfortunately, it's still something that's going on. And it will not stop until there are still people who buy things with uncertain or dubious provenance. So it's really important that museums and private collectors are sensitive to this topic because it creates such an enormous damage.

10:28It's not the material values, right? That's only a small part of it, the silver coin or whatever. It's that this really destroys archaeology because even if you recover the coin, it makes a huge difference for us if it comes from a tomb or from a shop or from under a threshold as some kind of building sacrifice. So really, don't buy anything, ancient objects, go to museums, don't have it at your home. That's the best response, I think. Well, there are, as you've suggested, institutions which have benefited quite enormously from controversial acquisitions, one of which, of course, is the Elgin Marbles, owned by the British Museum.

11:15Do you think they should be returned? It's part of the history in a way of the British Museum. And you can also argue that they were taken away from the Athenian acropolis. Lord Elgin had a permission to carry away some stones. He interpreted that in a very generous way. By the time the Ottoman authorities, the Greek state didn't exist. And of course, we have to understand that for Greece, the Parthenon Athens, that's really a national monument. A few years ago, the new Acropolis Museum was inaugurated. There's space for the Elgin marbles. I think it should be considered to give them back. I think the British Museum is a wonderful place, a wonderful museum, and it could brilliantly survive even without the Elgin marbles.

12:18So I think it's always important, as C.H. Lawrence said in a book, Etruscan Places, museums are wrong anyhow. But if you have them, let them be small. They're like zoos. Let them be local. Don't take the things. If you have to put them into a museum, a museum close to the place where they were found.

12:42You're listening to the interview from the BBC World Service, people shaping our world from all over the world. If journalism is the first draft of history, what happens if that draft is flawed? In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

13:26With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport and the more than the score podcast will be following all the action bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the bbc's expert sports journalists more than the score for the bbc world service listen now search for more than the score wherever you get your bbc podcasts

14:02For this episode of The Interview, I'm speaking to Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of Pompeii. Like many Europeans in the arts world, Gabriel is well-read and well-versed in music, about which he's passionate, perhaps not surprising given that his father was a piano teacher in southern Germany near Lake Constance. To meet, he's unassuming, charming, and erudite. He speaks several languages and has a German wife who he met in Italy, and they have two children. Before taking charge at Pompeii, he was at one of my favourite archaeological sites in southern Italy, Paistum, which is only a few hundred yards from the ocean, so you can be on the beach one minute and the next hop over to see three beautiful Greek temples.

14:52Well, let's return to my conversation with Gabriel Zutrigel. You were there at Heistam when another Greek temple was uncovered intact during restoration of the city walls. Yeah, that's often fascinating about our work, also in Pompeii. You start excavating not so much for research reasons. We weren't looking for this temple as we weren't looking for the Dionysian frescoes we discovered a few months ago in Pompeii. We did this excavation mainly for conservation reasons on the city walls. And at some point we stumbled across capitals and pieces of columns. And so we understood there must be a building, a small Doric building, the early 5th century BC.

15:43And we started to do, we didn't know where it was. So we started a geomagnetic prospection. You can actually look beneath the ground with modern technology, and we clearly saw it. We started excavating, and there it was. Is that what is so exciting about an archaeological dig? I mean, if you were to say to somebody who's never been on one, what is it that is so exciting? Well, it's often people ask, what would you like to find? And that's kind of what we can tell. Of course, sometimes we're looking for specific things. But it's actually the surprise that you always, you never find what you expect.

16:25And that's, thankfully, thank God it's like that, because otherwise it would be quite boring. Gabriel, you were appointed director of Pompeii in 2021. Was it a controversial appointment at all? Absolutely. Why? Too young, unexperienced. And so we had people resigning from the scientific board and writing letters. So it was a very heavy phase for me, my family. I wasn't prepared for that. So I asked a friend, a journalist, to read the press review and to let me know only if there's something I had to reply to. Because I said I have to stop. I have to concentrate on what I would like to do in Pompeii.

17:13And I have to say I found a really extraordinary team there. And so we started. And thanks to the people in Pompeii, we could overcome this initial difficulties and convince everyone that we were doing our best and that Pompeii was in safe hands, which is important because it's really a very, very fragile and complex site. Of course, it wasn't in safe hands in 79 AD when Vesuvius erupted. Tell me a little bit about that. How did people succumb? How did they die? The eruption was totally unexpected. People didn't know that Mount Vesuvius was a volcano. They had no modern science, geology, volcanology.

18:07So they were shocked. They were terrified. Later, still after decades, there were stories about giants in between the smoke were seen, the giants rebelling against the gods. Many thought there were no gods and the gods had abandoned the world. and there was a new age of eternal night for the world because the people in Pompeii obviously didn't know that it was only in Pompeii. They thought maybe this is now the end of the world. And so they took shelter because it started raining small pumice stones, the lapilli, only unfortunately this rain went on for something like 17 hours. You had buildings collapsing, people couldn't get out of their houses anymore because the La Pili had reached a height of about three meters.

19:06And then finally it stopped in the early morning of the 25th of August. But people thought maybe it's over. And no, it wasn't over. The second phase was deadly for everybody. Nobody survived who was still in Pompeii at that time. because the huge column of ash and smoke and material that had formed above Mount Vesuvius started to collapse. There was no pressure coming from beneath anymore. And so it formed these waves of hot ash and very high temperatures. 200 degrees. 200 degrees in Pompeii, people instantly died and were covered by the hot ash that then became solid soil. This is really unique about Pompeii.

20:00So the solid ash, the bodies of the dead dissolve over time. The textiles, the flesh, the hair, but it has been preserved as negative, as an imprint, as a cavity in the underground. As a cast. And you can make casts. And there you have children and women and men who have died during the eruption. You can actually look into their faces, something very touching and unique. And there are about a hundred of these casts made in the last 150 years. It must be when you come face to face with archaeology in that way, something that kind of transcends the everyday cataloguing. I remember one of our colleagues who were excavating the skeletons of two women and a child who died in the first phase of the eruption and that was horrible to see but then at the same time it's such a rich source of information, of evidence you can determine the sex and age and if they had diseases and whatever and one of our colleagues alessandro he said looking at them he said this is us we are what we excavate in a way the distance suddenly you recognize that these people who died 2000 years ago i mean in our bodies we have the same skeletons we are the same fragile human beings like them when you hear that does that really put you in on the scene of all of those people suddenly being wiped out i think it speaks to the child in us and when as adults we should not weep you know we have to be strong but then there's when when when you hear it you almost have to weep right and it's so touching yeah that's what i think um when i see the victims of the eruption the children especially you see the children you see the hope of their lives that were ended so abruptly and And that always reminds me of my own mortality and fragility.

22:26You've been overseeing now one of the biggest digs in Pompeii for over 70 years. How big is it? It's about 9 ,000 square meters inside and outside the ancient city. This is a huge responsibility, of course, because everything that was excavated then has to be preserved and restored. and monitored and it's also a huge opportunity for new research because now we have technologies that weren't there in the past and so we can do many things like analyzing the the skeletons and bones that were in the early years of the excavation simply thrown away a huge loss of data of course also a questionable treatment of these human remains of course So it's really a very, very fascinating, fertile moment for research on ancient Pompeii.

23:27There were some extraordinary finds, weren't there? One was a bakery with an incredible fresco. Yeah, it was much debated, especially in Italy. It seems, almost looks like a pizza. Of course, that can't be because they had no tomatoes at the time and no mozzarella. But it's probably a kind of flat bread, a pita bread, with some very simple things, dates, maybe some spices. And then you see a cup of wine next to it. So that's in some form the ancestor of the pizza, I think we could reasonably call it. reading one of the many fascinating little things that came out of your book was the fact that you like to go for nocturnal walks in pompeii that's a privilege of the director to or who works in pompeii that we can be there also after closing time which is really magic in the nighttime without any light only the light of the stars and the moon, the sounds.

24:40It's almost as if the city comes back to life in a way, which is often the case if you go into the houses of Pompeii, you feel like the owners must have just left five minutes ago.

25:05BBC podcasts, including episodes with former US Vice President Kamala Harris, global education activist Malala Yousafzai, and Venezuelan opposition leader Maria Corina Machado. Until the next time, goodbye for now.

25:35In 1999, four Russian apartment buildings were bombed, hundreds killed. But even now, we still don't know for sure who did it. It's a mystery that sparked chilling theories. I'm Helena Merriman, and in a new BBC series, I'm talking to the reporters who first covered this story. What did they miss the first time? The History Bureau, Putin and the apartment bombs. Listen on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts. With the European Athletics Championships, the Men's FIFA World Cup and the Commonwealth Games all taking place, 2026 is shaping up to be a terrific year for global sport. And the More Than The Score podcast will be following all the action, bringing you interviews with sports stars and exploring the stories beyond the score sheets with the BBC's expert sports journalists.

26:26More Than The Score from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for More Than The Score wherever you get your BBC podcasts.