He is also significant for his expansion of the Archaeological Service and his patronage of Panagiotis Stamatakis, who succeeded him as Ephor General and whom he appointed to oversee the excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at Mycenae.

[6] In 1837, Efstratiadis received a government scholarship to study in at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich, where he was taught by the classicist and philhellene Friedrich Thiersch,[4] and to read classical philology at the Humboldt University of Berlin.

One of his teachers in Berlin was August Böckh, the compiler of the Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, a series of publications aiming to collate all known inscriptions from ancient Greece.

[14] The archaeological historian Nikolaos Papazarkadas has described the stele as "one of the earliest attempts at integrating, however awkwardly, epigraphical knowledge in contemporary cultural practices.

The purchase was driven by Pittakis, who believed that the house was the site of the bouleuterion (the ancient city's assembly building) and the temples known as the metroon and the tholos, and required the society to raise 12,000 drachmas[d] by selling shares it owned in the National Bank of Greece.

11 September] 1852, the society commissioned Efstratiadis, Pittakis, its president Georgios Glakaris [el], and three architects – Lysandros Kaftanzoglou, Panagis Kalkos and Dimitrios Zezos [Wikidata] – to report on the state of the Erechtheion, a temple on the Acropolis of Athens.

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

[20] The occupation led to an outbreak of cholera, which lasted from June 1854 to January 1855 and killed around 3,000 people,[21] including the Archaeological Society's president, Georgios Gennadios.

[16] At the instigation of the Minister for Education, Charalampos Christopoulos, the society reformed in 1858, and was helped in restoring its membership by the collapse of the Archaeological Association, which had folded in 1854.

[23] In 1863, he led the archaeological society's excavations in the Kerameikos cemetery, one of the few places where ancient funerary monuments could be found in situ, owing to the unusual depth at which the site was buried.

Efstratidis' work has been praised by the archaeological historian Lena Costaki for his practice of collecting chance finds and expropriating private land when necessary to ensure the coherency of the excavations.

[24] His published scholarly output was limited; apart from the publication of the Psoma House inscriptions, he wrote fifteen articles in the Archaeological Journal on epigraphical matters between 1869 and 1874.

His entries testify to his struggles with profiteering by those buying the stone blocks taken from the medieval Frankish Tower at the Propylaia, with complaints from local residents that unstable piles of spoil from the excavations were endangering their homes, and with looting of antiquities, as well as the challenges of protecting objects and monuments from weathering once they had been exposed to the elements.

[31] Throughout his time as Ephor General, he employed the state's resources to oppose the quarrying of the hills around Athens, which contained valuable archaeological remains, and to expropriate private property to allow excavations, particularly in the Theatre of Dionysus and the Kerameikos.

Efstratiadis obtained ministerial approval for the project, which would be carried out by the Archaeological Society, though the final removal of the tower was delayed until 1875 by administrative reluctance and the personal intervention of King George.

[37] Schliemann's actions were widely criticised outside Greece,[38] though Archaeological Society defended them as a means of "the restoration of the Greek character of the shining face of the Acropolis, pure and unsullied by anything foreign".

[43]Efstratiadis's handling of Schliemann's case mirrored his earlier treatment, in January 1866, of the art dealers Grigorios Bournias and Ioannis Palaiologos, who had asked permission to excavate in the Profitis Ilias area of Athens.

In 1873, for example, Efstratiadis noted in his records the illegal export by the art dealer Anastasios Erneris of a series of funerary plaques, painted by Exekias, to the German archaeologist Gustav Hirschfeld, but was unable to prevent or reverse the sale.

[48] 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".

[58] Efstratiadis maintained a friendly correspondence with his former teacher, August Böckh,[59] and sought his advice on behalf of the Archaeological Society in 1851 over the reading of an inscription, now known to be from the base of the Phrasikleia Kore.