[1] Karouzou's work included reorganising the collections - identifying artefacts which had not been properly catalogued, recording them, and arranging new displays—work which she described as 'invisible service'.

[1][2] Karouzou later recalled that "It was with pride for our people that I was assured, in the end of the war when the boxes were opened and the antiquities received, despite [the] fatally insufficient supervision [of the packing process] not a single gold object, no precious gem was missing".

As a political liberal, Karouzou was labelled a dissident and banned from accessing material in the museum by the junta-appointed General Director of Antiquities, Spyridon Marinatos.

An international outcry arose over this prohibition; a letter written by a group of British archaeologists (including Bernard Ashmole and John Boardman) was published on the front page of The Times.

[16] This led to Karouzou being allowed to leave the country to spend time visiting exiled Greeks in Rome and Lyon and to work as an invited scholar at the universities of Tübingen and Geneva.

[1] Following the fall of the junta in 1974, Karouzou was able to return to Greece and become chair of the Greek arm of the Lexicon Iconographicarum Mythologicae Classicae ('Lexicon of the Iconographies of Classical Mythology').

[1][5][17] Archaeologists Nikolaidou and Kokkinidou (specialists in the history of Greek archaeology) describe Karouzou as "perhaps the most important woman in Greek archaeology", and refer to her "continuous scholarly effort, broad intellectual perspective, social contribution and democratic sensitivity" and the innovative nature of her approach to ancient artefacts, particularly iconography on pottery, by which she "moved beyond the images to real people, their everyday life, attitudes and ideologies".