THE EARLY BEGINNING

1805
THE FIRST IN THE FAMILY TO BECOME CAPTIVATED 
BY THE SCIENCE OF LAW

The early history begins with Emmanouil Lambadarios, born in 1805 in Aegina, an island close to Athens. He was the first in the family to become captivated by the science of law even though the conditions at the time wouldn’t allow him to study it. Greece was fighting the War of Independence against the Ottoman Empire (1821-32). 

Aegina, 1830. - Founding of the Central School, the first school in the modern Greek state to provide secondary-level education.
National Printing Office.

Once Greece was declared an independent state, addressing illiteracy became a priority. General education was essential in creating a state and modernizing the country. And so, Governor Kapodistrias established the “Central School” in Aegina. In beleaguered, post-revolutionary Greece, Aegina served as the capital of the newly formed state for approximately 20 months, before being transferred to Nafplio first and eventually to Athens in 1834. The Central School of Aegina became the cradle of education for modern Greeks. 

Constantine’s manuscript

One of the first students to attend the Central School of Aegina was Emmanouil Lambadarios. He was a calligrapher. This is a sample of his hand-writing:

In 1839 an announcement in the Official Government Gazette reported that Emmanouil had been appointed clerk to the Aegina Magistrates’ Court. In a later source, a contract that was found seems to have been drawn up by him, revealing he had by then become a notary public in Aegina. This explains the enigmatic expression “involvement with the law” his son, Constantine, used when referring to his father, in a manuscript regarding his ancestors.