Athens War Museum

The Greek State, wishing to honour all those who fought for the freedom of Greece, decided in 1964 to establish a War Museum. The museum was inaugurated in July 1975 and continues to operate today. Its mission is to collect, preserve and exhibit war relics, to study, document and promote the struggles of the Greek nation from antiquity to the present day, with the aim of preserving national memory and promoting the historical continuity and unity of Hellenism.

Today, the War Museum is the largest museum of military history in Greece and one of the largest in South-eastern Europe. In its premises, relics related to the history of the Greeks from all war periods are exhibited, while at the same time there are sections of the historical, photographic and cinematographic archives. The first branch of the War Museum was opened in Nafplio in 1988, the second in Chania in 1995, and the third in Thessaloniki and Tripoli in 2000.

The emblem of the War Museum is inspired by the medal awarded to the fighters of the Greek Revolution of 1821 as the “Award for the Independence Struggle 1821-1829” where the inscription “ΤΟΙΣ ΗΡΩΙΚΟΙΣ ΠΡΟΜΑΧΟΙΣ ΤΗΣ ΠΑΤΡΙΔΟΣ” (To the Heroic Defenders of Our Motherland) was engraved on the four antennae of the cross. The emblem of the War Museum is completed with the phrase “ΠΟΛΕΜΙΩΝ ΑΜΥΝΕΣΘΑΙ ΑΓΑΘΟΝ ΕΝΕΣΤΙΝ” (to defend against your enemy is good), a quote from Pericles’ Funeral Oration, as we read in the Athenian historian Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War.