During and after the war, Pittakis corresponded with the British architect Thomas Leverton Donaldson, sharing with him news of archaeological discoveries to which scholars outside Greece no longer had access.

[37] The story has, however, been described as a "powerful myth"[38] with a prominent place in the Greek national discourse,[34] particularly around the debate over the restitution of the Parthenon marbles taken from the temple by Lord Elgin in the early nineteenth century, while Athens was still under Ottoman rule.

"[45] Pittakis returned to Athens, where he resumed his early work of collecting inscriptions, sending several to the German scholar August Böckh for inclusion in the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum.

1 September],[50] Pittakis was appointed to the unpaid role of "custodian of the antiquities in Athens",[51] in which capacity he gave tours of the Acropolis to foreign visitors: one of whom was the American author and poet Nathaniel Parker Willis, who recalled being shown Byron's graffito of his own name on one of the columns of the Erechtheion.

8 November], Pittakis proposed to the Minister for Education, Iakovos Rizos Neroulos [el], that his role include responsibility for collecting the Acropolis's scattered antiquities, and establishing a museum in which they could be stored.

[17] Around the same time, he was asked by the state to recommend a site for an archaeological museum in Athens, following a request from the local prefect for 300 drachmas,[57] approximately equivalent to a month of an upper-middle-class salary,[58] to repair the Temple of Hephaestus (then known as the Theseion) for the purpose.

18 August] 1834, by a royal decree issued on the advice of the Bavarian architect Leo von Klenze, the troops were dismissed from the Acropolis and the area declared an archaeological site.

[69] Despite Pittakis's existing status as "custodian" of its antiquities and the fact that Athens fell under the jurisdiction of his sub-ephorate, he was not selected to carry out the restoration work:[70] instead, the task went to the German-born Ross, a favourite of King Otto,[71] who was recommended by Klenze directly.

[77] In this volume, he published the discovery of several Ionic column capitals in the wall of the Church of the Agia Kyra Kandili near the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, along with a dedication to Hestia, which he took to indicate an ancient temple.

[8] In 1834 and 1835, excavations in the Piraeus, Athens's ancient harbour, uncovered a series of inscriptions known as the "Naval Records",[81] which gave information on the administration and financing of the Athenian navy between the fifth and fourth centuries BCE.

[100][101] From 1837, Pittakis, assisted by the Swiss sculptor Heinrich Max Imhof and Ross's former collaborators Schaubert and Laurent, carried out restoration work in the Archaeological Society's name on the Acropolis.

[107] Pittakis also excavated the building, down to the floor level of its phase as a Christian church (between approximately the sixth and the fifteenth centuries),[108] uncovering tombs in the southern part and a cistern in the western area.

15 February] 1839, he wrote to the Ministry of Education, proposing that a royal decree be issued to dramatically expand the powers of the state to protect antiquities and prosecute those damaging them, but his letter was never acted upon.

10 April], Pittakis announced to the society that he knew of a plot of land which he believed to contain significant antiquities, including the remains of the bouleuterion (the ancient city's assembly building) and the temples known as the metroon and the tholos.

[115] In April 1854, on the outbreak of the Crimean War, British and French troops occupied the Piraeus with the aim of preventing Greece from assisting the Russian Empire against Ottoman Turkey.

[126] One of his first actions, in 1843, was to complete the demolition of the eighteenth-century Parthenon mosque,[127] which had been partially destroyed during the War of Independence:[128] Ross had begun this work in 1835, but been forced to stop by a lack of heavy equipment.

[135] As Ross had before him, Pittakis concentrated his efforts on those fragments that showed signs of carving, or which bore inscriptions: other pieces were often recycled as part of improvised repairs to the Acropolis's monuments, or sold to visiting tourists.

[138] A substantial problem was the habit of visitors, especially sailors from the harbour of Piraeus, of chipping away pieces from the ancient structures, particularly the Erechtheion:[139] to combat this, Pittakis had the whole temple clad in a protective layer of stone.

[140] Pittakis enlisted Charles Ernest Beulé, an archaeologist of the French School at Athens, to assist with the removal of medieval and modern structures from the remaining parts of the Propylaia in 1852.

[155] Rangavis, with whom he had quarrelled over his approach to restorations[156] and over his handling of the Naval Records affair,[87] delivered the eulogy at his funeral, in which he praised Pittakis's devotion to the classical past and did much to establish his reputation as a patriot and protector of Greece's antiquities.

[6] In support of his excavations of the Athenian agora in the area of Vrysaki, Pittakis claimed that all but sixty houses in Athens had been destroyed by the Turks, a figure questioned by modern studies.

[165] Pittakis's accounts of the Turks' indifferent or destructive attitude to antiquities have been interpreted as part of a commonplace in pre-revolutionary Greece, where the Ottomans were presented as religious zealots liable to destroy Greek monuments.

"[170] In 1830, the Tyrolean scholar Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer published History of the Morea Peninsula During the Middle Ages,[q] in which he argued that the Greek population had been totally replaced during the early medieval period through Slavic and Albanian migration.

"[176] According to Fallmerayer, by contrast, "only a romantic, eager imagination [could] still dream of a revival in our days of the ancient Hellenes with their Sophocleses and Platos",[177] and support for the Greek state in western Europe could achieve nothing but the strengthening of Slavic Russia, widely seen as a threat to the other European Great Powers.

[184][r] In 1843, the Greek historian Konstantinos Paparrigopoulos published a reply, criticising Fallmerayer's reliance on sources from comparatively late historical periods, such as the Chronicle of Monemvasia,[187] a controversial manuscript whose narrative was likely composed between the tenth and fourteenth centuries.

[123] He has been praised as the first Greek scholar to make substantial use of epigraphy in reconstructing the classical past,[22] for his efforts in preserving objects and the texts of inscriptions which would otherwise have been lost,[192] and for his energetic approach to the excavation and conservation of Greece's ancient monuments.

[77] Papazarkadas has suggested that Pittakis may have published more inscriptions than any other epigrapher in history,[194] while Petrakos has credited him (along with Rangavis and Andreas Moustoxydis) as being one of only three Greeks of the mid-nineteenth century who understood the discipline of archaeology in its modern sense.

[139] He has been criticised for undertaking restoration work with little prior study or documentation of the buildings,[106] and for reconstructing both the Parthenon and the Erechtheion to place better-preserved items of masonry in more prominent positions, regardless of the original construction.

[203] The negative reaction to his restorations, particularly in the Parthenon and Erechtheion, has been credited with inspiring the significant changes in approach adopted when the next major phase of the Acropolis's reconstruction began at the end of the nineteenth century, under Nikolaos Balanos.

[204] The later archaeologist of Mycenae, Spyridon Iakovidis [Wikidata], described Pittakis's work at the site as "half-hearted" in comparison to the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann and Christos Tsountas later in the century.