Pittakis was succeeded by
Panagiotis Efstratiadis, a prominent member of the
Archaeological Society of Athens. Efstratiadis expanded the work of the Archaeological Service outside Athens, supporting excavations on the island of
Euboea. He also secured ministerial approval for the 1875 demolition of the medieval
Frankish Tower on the Acropolis, carried out by the Archaeological Society with funding from the German businessman and archaeologist
Heinrich Schliemann, and sent his personal assistant,
Panagiotis Stamatakis, to supervise Schliemann's 1876 excavations of
Mycenae. Efstratiadis attempted, largely unsuccessfully, to use the state's powers against the illegal excavation and export of antiquities: in 1867, he denounced the epigrapher and art dealer
Athanasios Rhousopoulos for selling the so-called
Aineta aryballos to the
British Museum, calling him "university professor, antiquities looter", while in 1873 he failed to prevent the art dealer Anastasios Erneris from selling a series of funerary plaques, painted by
Exekias, to the German archaeologist
Gustav Hirschfeld. The archaeologist and archaeological historian Yannis Galanakis has judged that the limited financial and legal resources available to Efstratiadis, as well as the lack of political will to assist him on the part of the Greek state, meant that his goal of controlling the illegal excavation and trade of antiquities was "impossible to achieve". Until the mid-1870s, the Greek Archaeological Service consisted entirely of the Ephor General himself, sometimes supported by a personal assistant. In 1871, the privately organised
Archaeological Society of Athens, which had taken on some of the state's responsibility for excavating and managing cultural heritage, began to appoint its own travelling ephors, known as 'apostles'. The primary duties of these 'apostles' were to conduct archaeological work throughout Greece, to combat
archaeological looting and the illegal trade in antiquities, and to persuade citizens to hand over antiquities, particularly those acquired illegally, to the care of the state. The first of these was Stamatakis, whose work formed the basis for several public archaeological collections throughout Greece. From the 1870s, the Archaeological Service began to employ its own ephors, expanding continuously until the early 1910s. These ephors generally had responsibility for a particular region of Greece: Stamatakis, for example, was recruited in 1875 to oversee antiquities in
Central Greece. Efstratiadis also recruited
Panagiotis Kavvadias, followed by Konstantinos Dimitriadis in 1881 and by five further appointments in 1883 and 1885, including those of
Christos Tsountas and
Valerios Stais. This expansion continued throughout the next two decades, providing the core of the service's twentieth-century administrative apparatus. On Efstratiadis's retirement in 1884, Stamatakis succeeded him: he established several local archaeological museums around Greece, but died of
malaria less than a year after his appointment, and was succeeded by Kavvadias in 1885. Kavvadias finished the excavation of the Acropolis and the removal of almost all of its post-classical structures. He also published the service's first periodical, the monthly
Archaeological Bulletin (), expanded its portfolio of museums, and worked to increase the influence of the Archaeological Service at the expense of that of the Archaeological Society, of which he was also a prominent member. He created much of the bureaucratic apparatus of the modern Archaeological Service. Through a royal decree of , he established the
Archaeological Receipts Fund, which used the proceeds of the sales of tickets,
casts and catalogues by museums to fund the conservation and restoration of ancient monuments. He was also behind the Royal Decree of , which created the first systematic division of Greece into archaeological regions. Kavvadias continued the recruitment of new ephors: by the end of his tenure, the Service had recruited over a dozen (having previously employed only the Ephor General between 1836 and 1866), including
Habbo Gerhard Lolling and Konstantinos Kourouniotis, and established operations on the island of Crete, then
an autonomous province of the Ottoman Empire. He also imposed the first formal academic criteria for ephors – his predecessor as Ephor General, Panagiotis Stamatakis, had received no university education or formal archaeological training – requiring that all ephors be graduates of the University of Athens, and either to have undertaken postgraduate study in archaeology or to pass an examination in archaeology, history, Ancient Greek and Latin. In 1887, he imposed the stricter requirement that all potential ephors hold a
doctorate in either philology or archaeology, and that they subsequently pass an interview before a board composed of professors of classics, archaeology and history. Following the
Goudi coup of , Kavvadias's subordinates launched their own so-called "mutiny of the ephors", angered by his style of leadership, which has since been described as both "authoritarian" and "tyrannical". He was forced to step down, following heavy criticism in the press, in December 1909. The Greek government subsequently reorganised the Archaeological Service. Kavvadias's duties were given to the archaeologist
Gabriel Byzantinos, who was shortly afterwards replaced by , the director of Athens's
Epigraphical Museum. Under Law 3721, dated , the General Ephorate was abolished, in favour of a more collective system of management where the function of the Ephor General was assumed by the 'Archaeological Board', a ten-member committee of university professors, ephors and the directors of Athens's museums, on which the newly titled Director of the Archaeological Service had a single vote. The country was re-divided into seven archaeological districts, replacing the nine established by Kavvadias in 1886. == After Kavvadias (1909) ==