Efforts to create a museum in Mystras had started since the end of the 19th century. Then the first informal museum was founded in the eastern wing of the metropolitan complex by the French Byzantine scholar Gabriel Millet. Sculptured architectural members from the temples of Mystras were placed there, while at the beginning of the 20th century the collection was enriched, with the contribution of the Metropolitan of Sparta, Theoklitos Minopoulos.
The Museum of Mystras was officially founded in 1952, when the collection was moved to the western wing of the metropolitan complex. In the hall on the first floor, small artefacts were presented, coming, in the majority, from excavations at the site, as well as portable icons, while on the ground floor the oldest exhibition of sculptures was enriched by the transfer of objects from the Byzantine era, which until then were in the Museum of Sparta. Then the exhibition was extended to the semi-outdoor and courtyard areas of the metropolitan complex, continuing a trend that had already been adopted by personalities such as Metropolitan Ananias Lampardis, who, as lovers of the art of the past, during the construction of the metropolitan complex, made sure to decorate the aspects of it with sculptures, highlighting them at the same time.
In 2001, the permanent exhibition was reorganized, with a new thematic, museological and museographic approach, dictated by the need to present the latest research findings.
The re-exhibition, entitled "Byzantium and the West: the experience of the late Byzantine urban center of Mystras", focuses on the relations and contacts of the Byzantine state with the West, relations that become the occasion of influences on both sides and shape the particular physiognomy of the political and social reality , of the intellectual life and art of the Paleolog era. Mystras, a thriving late-Byzantine urban center, is an excellent field for tracing the approach of Byzantium and the medieval West shortly before the Renaissance.
Editor: Fotini Anastasopoulou