(tel. 28210 96046)
The Byzantine and Christian Museum, one of the most important museums in the world, was founded in 1914. It has more than 15,000 objects, organized into collections, which date from the 3rd to the 19th century. These collections include sculptures, icons, miniature works, wall paintings, ceramics and textiles, manuscripts, drawings, antibulae, copper engravings, palaeotypes, as well as copies of Byzantine and post-Byzantine wall paintings and mosaics. They come from the entire Greek area but also from areas of major Hellenism. The richness of the collections and the value of the exhibits make it a real ark of Byzantine and post-Byzantine art.
The Museum is going through a transitional period, a period of intense changes on many levels. The ultimate goal and the biggest challenge is of course the re-exhibition of its permanent collections, in a way that on the one hand meets modern museological specifications and on the other hand allows visitors to navigate more than fifteen centuries of art and culture, while understanding the complex conditions under the which were created. A wide range of museological practices is applied where the philosophy of the hermeneutic approach is combined with a synthesis of "small stories", which focus on aspects of Byzantine and post-Byzantine culture, thus avoiding a linear approach to the past and treating art and material culture not only as aesthetic phenomenon but also as a testimony of culture.
Editor: Fotini Anastasopoulou