Byzantine and Christian Museum

The Byzantine and Christian Museum, based in Athens, is one of the country’s national museums and one of the most important international museums of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine art and culture. It was founded at the beginning of the 20th century (1914) with the aim of collecting, studying, preserving and exhibiting the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine cultural heritage in the Greek territory. The museum’s collection contains a significant number of objects (about 30,000) such as portable icons, sculptures, ceramics, ecclesiastical textiles, paintings, micro-art and architectural elements (murals and mosaics). Everything is recorded, arranged in chronological order according to material and subject, and digitised using electronic recording systems. What is not on display in the permanent exhibition is kept in modern archaeological storehouses under ideal conditions of humidity and temperature.

Each object exhibited in the museum can offer the viewer knowledge, historical and archaeological information, but above all information about the culture that created it. The placement of objects in a museum seems static: each object is placed among other objects, usually related and of a similar age, that represent a historical aspect and a certain moment of the past. But this is not quite the truth, since in this museum, the visitor can see the exhibits from a different perspective, selected according to different criteria, placed in different contexts and, ultimately, narrated different stories related to “invisible” or lesser-known aspects of life in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods. The museum’s permanent collection is divided into two main sections: The first part is dedicated to the Byzantine period (from the 4th to the 15th century AD) and contains 1,200 exhibits and the second part entitled ”From Byzantium to the Modern Era”, contains 1,500 exhibits from the 15th to the 20th century.