Dora Katsonopoulou

Dora Katsonopoulou is a Greek archaeologist and president of the Helike Society. In 1988 she and the scientist Steven Soter launched the Helike Project to find Helike, the city in Achaea, on the Gulf of Corinth, destroyed by an earthquake and sea surge in the winter of 373 BCE.

For centuries searchers had looked for the city on the seabed. Katsonopoulou and Soter argued that the ancient word poros in the sources meant an inland lagoon rather than the open gulf, and that the ruins lay under sediment on land. In 2001 the project found remains of the classical city buried in an ancient lagoon near the village of Rizomylos. The disaster appears to have involved ground liquefaction and subsidence that sank the city into the lagoon, which later filled with river silt.

Excavations under her direction have also found earlier settlements, including an Early Bronze Age town. Because Plato wrote of Atlantis only a few decades after Helike vanished, many scholars think its fate helped inspire his story.