Margo Sullivan was a forger. Or was she? In a stunning interview published in the Paris Herald (March 1929), Sullivan confessed—but with a twist. She had not tried to deceive, she claimed. Rather, she was "completing a conversation with Sappho that time had interrupted." "Those idols are real," she said. "Not real in the sense of being 2,500 years old. But real in the sense that they carry the truth of Lesbos—the truth of women loving women, of poets defying empires, of islanders who sing when they should weep. I carved them. I buried them. I dug them up. And in that act, I became an archaeologist of the soul." The press crucified her. She was called the "Idol of Lesbos" for the first time in a scathing Times editorial, which intended the nickname as mockery: "Margo Sullivan, the false idol of a false Lesbos, has deceived the credulous."
Inside the box was a single, handwritten note: "Found near the Gulf of Kalloni, 1924. Property of M. Sullivan. No further provenance."
Her will was one sentence: "Bury me with the idols. They are my children. They are Sappho’s grandchildren." For decades, Margo Sullivan was a punchline in archaeology textbooks—the classic case of the "passionate amateur" turned forger. But the rise of queer studies and feminist art history in the 1980s began to rehabilitate her.
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Margo Sullivan was a forger. Or was she? In a stunning interview published in the Paris Herald (March 1929), Sullivan confessed—but with a twist. She had not tried to deceive, she claimed. Rather, she was "completing a conversation with Sappho that time had interrupted." "Those idols are real," she said. "Not real in the sense of being 2,500 years old. But real in the sense that they carry the truth of Lesbos—the truth of women loving women, of poets defying empires, of islanders who sing when they should weep. I carved them. I buried them. I dug them up. And in that act, I became an archaeologist of the soul." The press crucified her. She was called the "Idol of Lesbos" for the first time in a scathing Times editorial, which intended the nickname as mockery: "Margo Sullivan, the false idol of a false Lesbos, has deceived the credulous."
Inside the box was a single, handwritten note: "Found near the Gulf of Kalloni, 1924. Property of M. Sullivan. No further provenance." idol of lesbos margo sullivan
Her will was one sentence: "Bury me with the idols. They are my children. They are Sappho’s grandchildren." For decades, Margo Sullivan was a punchline in archaeology textbooks—the classic case of the "passionate amateur" turned forger. But the rise of queer studies and feminist art history in the 1980s began to rehabilitate her. Margo Sullivan was a forger
