Museum of Modern Pottery

The Centre for the Study of Modern Pottery – G. Psaropoulos Foundation, is a museum, research and educational organization dedicated to Greek pottery from the 16th to the 20th centuries. It was founded in 1987 by Betty Psaropoulou and became a Foundation in 1993, supervised by the Culture Sport and Finance Ministers (Government Gazette 297B/28-4-1993).

The Centre is a non-profit foundation and its purpose is to discover, find, collect, preserve, study and present all kinds of material related to the art of pottery and any other activity related to this subject.

The founder of the Centre is Betty Psaropoulou (1930-2010). Born into an Athenian family in the 1930s, Betty Psaropoulou was introduced at an early age to important literary and artistic figures who inspired her interest in folk culture and folk art.

Her interest in ceramics began in the 1950s, when she realised the importance of utilitarian pottery in everyday life and the lack of interest in this subject among folklorists of the era. Her studies with the teacher Panos Valsamakis contributed to this direction. The collection of ceramics and the information gathered during her many years of travelling and research in Greece formed the core of the foundation of the Centre.

The establishment of the Centre is not only a testimony to Bettys Psaropoulou’s great love for art and potters, but also an act of responsibility towards the vast archive material, which she has tried to make systematic and serious through continuous study and publication. In recent years, she has also promoted the presentation of works by contemporary artists such as Hera Triandafyllidi, Eleutheria Drossaki, etc. at the Centre.