Margo Sullivan was a forger. Or was she? In a stunning interview published in the Paris Herald (March 1929), Sullivan confessed—but with a twist. She had not tried to deceive, she claimed. Rather, she was "completing a conversation with Sappho that time had interrupted." "Those idols are real," she said. "Not real in the sense of being 2,500 years old. But real in the sense that they carry the truth of Lesbos—the truth of women loving women, of poets defying empires, of islanders who sing when they should weep. I carved them. I buried them. I dug them up. And in that act, I became an archaeologist of the soul." The press crucified her. She was called the "Idol of Lesbos" for the first time in a scathing Times editorial, which intended the nickname as mockery: "Margo Sullivan, the false idol of a false Lesbos, has deceived the credulous."
Sullivan’s idols have been re-evaluated by scientists, too. In 2018, thermoluminescence dating on a "fake" idol held at the University of Cambridge showed that while the clay was indeed Irish, the burn marks on its surface were consistent with ancient Greek sacrificial fires. Had Sullivan actually used her idols in authentic rituals? Or did she simply light bonfires to age her forgeries? idol of lesbos margo sullivan
Critics now argue that Sullivan was not a forger but a hyperrealist —an artist who used the language of ancient ritual to speak about modern identity. Her idols, they say, are not fakes. They are disguised as antiques. Why "Idol of Lesbos" Still Matters Today, the keyword "Idol of Lesbos Margo Sullivan" draws a strange and diverse crowd: queer travelers planning pilgrimages to Eressos; art historians writing post-colonial critiques of the museum industry; and young poets looking for a muse who is part oracle, part con artist, part saint. Margo Sullivan was a forger
Lesbos, at the time, was a backwater of trauma. The aftermath of the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922) had left the island flooded with refugees. The classical romanticism of Sappho—the "Tenth Muse" who wrote her love poems for women on the very same shores—had been replaced by poverty, cholera, and the stench of burning olive groves. She had not tried to deceive, she claimed
But Sullivan embraced the title. She changed the nameplate on her Eressos home to "To Idolion" (The Little Idol). She began dressing in Grecian tunics, holding salons for exiled lesbian writers and artists, and signing her letters: "Margo Sullivan, Idol of Lesbos." What happened next remains murky. Sullivan vanished from public records during the Axis occupation of Greece in WWII. Some say she hid in the mountains with the Greek resistance, using her idols as rabbit-hunting decoys. Others claim she was arrested by the Nazis for hosting a "decadent Sapphic salon" and spent three years in a prison on Rhodes.
Inside the box was a single, handwritten note: "Found near the Gulf of Kalloni, 1924. Property of M. Sullivan. No further provenance."