Dr Gisela Hellenkemper Salies

Gisela Salies was born in Königshütte, Schlesien, on 19 February 1944 and went to both school and university in Cologne, where she read classics and classical archaeology before specialising in classical archaeology and Aegean prehistory at the University of Athens and the German Archaeological Institute in Athens. She then returned to Cologne where, under the supervision of Professor H Kähler, she wrote her thesis entitled ‘Untersuchungen zu den geometrischen Gliederungsscgemata römischer Mosaiken’ (published in Bonner Jahrbücher 174, 1974), which won her a specially commended doctorate in 1972. Her first post was as a research assistant at the Akademie de Wissenschaften Mainz, working on the ‘Corpus für Minoische und Mykenische Siegel’, published in the Marburg Forschungsaufträge in Kreta (Museum Heraklion). This valuable experience led to her appointment in 1976 as a curator at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn des Landschaftsverbandes Rhineland, with responsibility for editing both Bonner Jahrbücher and various monographs. Her success in increasing the number and international importance of the museum’s publications was recognized in 1980 with the establishment of a separate substantial department, ‘Wissenschaftliche Publikationen’ with Dr Hellenkemper Salies (she had married Professor Hansgerd Hellenkemper in 1979) as Abteilungsdirektorin. Though much of her time was spent in editing and publishing the work of others, Hellenkemper Salies continued her own research and she began to earn an international reputation as an authority on Roman and Byzantine mosaics. She published extensive papers on mosaics in Bonner Jahrbücher, Germania, Gnomon, the proceedings of international congresses on Roman and Byzantine art and archaeology, and collaborated on the volumes of the Tabula Imperii Byzantii under the auspices of the Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. It was also as an expert on mosaics that she was, from 1978, a member of the mission from the University of British Columbia to Anemurium in Turkey. But Hellenkemper Salies’s greatest academic achievement was in a different field and came in 1990-4, as director of the joint Tunisian-German project for the conservation and exhibition of the large first-century BC shipwreck found at Mahdia off the Tunisian coast. Between 1908 and 1913 the cargo of 300 tons of architectural elements and art had been salvaged and transferred to the Bardo Museum in Tunis. Alarming signs of corrosion began to appear in the bronze objects during the 1980s and in 1987 the Institut National du Patrimoine, Tunis, commited some five hundred specimens to the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn for conservation - a momentous diplomatic initiative between the two governments. Hellenkemper Salies led this major multinational research exercise with great distinction. She defined the academic problems and the work of her team resulted in a fresh view of the interaction of Greek and Roman art and social history in the first century BC. A celebratory exhibition of the restored bronzes took place in Bonn and Paris in 1994, followed by their re-installation in the Bardo Museum; the same year saw the publication of the two volume report on the work, Das Wrack: der antike Schiffsfund von Mahdia, edited by Hellenkemper Salies and incorporating contributions by her and, last but not least, she lectured to a packed Meeting Room on the shipwreck. Hellenkemper Salies modestly believed that her work, and that of her colleagues had simply opened up a new avenue to explore so that, in 1996, she published a group of papers by herself and eleven others surveying the state of opinion two years after the first volumes had appeared (‘Neue Forschungen zum Schiffsfund von Mahdia’, Bonner Jahrbücher 196, 1996). Gisela Salies’s marriage to Hansgerd Hellenkemper was a true meeting of scholarly minds which stimulated both to accomplish more than would have been possible alone, but it was also a private happiness which supported them through her final illness. She died, at the cruelly early age of fifty-five, on 5 May 1999.