Sophia's double: photography, archaeology, and modern Greece.

This article examines the nineteenth-century photograph of Sophia Engastromenou Schliemann dressed as Helen of Troy, analyzing it as an eidōlon—an ancient Greek concept meaning image, phantom, or double—and exploring its role in the entanglement of scientific archaeology, photographic technology, and modern Greek national identity. Sophia’s portrait, adorned with jewellery allegedly excavated by her husband Heinrich Schliemann from the site of ancient Troy, functioned as a visual claim linking modern Greece to Homeric epic and asserting the historicity of the Trojan War, while also circulating widely beyond her control. The article situates this photographic eidōlon within broader nineteenth-century practices of archaeological documentation, nation-building, and philhellenism, comparing it to other forms of material and visual doubles such as death masks and plaster busts, and tracing its ongoing geopolitical and cultural afterlife through museum displays and contemporary interpretations.