Museums

Acropolis Museum

The new Acropolis Museum is an archaeological museum that offers a walk through history. For the first time ever all the surviving treasures of the Acropolis can be seen together in one place. Works currently held in storage, in other Athenian museums and museum abroad have been brought together within the one museum close to their original location.

The Acropolis Museum is located in the historical area of Makriyianni, southeast of the Rock of the Acropolis, on Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, Athens. It is only 300 meters from the Acropolis and approximately 2 kilometers from Syntagma, Athens main city square. The Museum entrance is located at the beginning of the pedestrian walkway of Dionysiou Areopagitou Street, which constitutes the central route for the unified network of the city's archaeological sites. The Acropolis station of the Metro is on the east side of the Museum site.

National Archaeological Museum

The National Archaeological Museum is the largest museum in Greece and one of the world's great museums. Although its original purpose was to secure all the finds from the nineteenth century excavations in and around Athens, it gradually became the central National Archaeological Museum and was enriched with finds from all over Greece. Its abundant collections, with more than 20,000 exhibits, provide a panorama of Greek civilization from the beginnings of Prehistory to Late Antiquity.

The Museum is located in the Exarhia area in central Athens, between Epirus Street, Bouboulinas Street and Tositsas Street. Its entrance is on Patission Avenue, next to the historical Athens Polytechnic building. It is a short walk from Metro stations Omonoia and Viktoria.

Museum Of Cycladic Art

Owned by the Nicholas P. Goulandris foundation, the Museum Of Cycladic Art offers an extensive and unique private collection of prehistoric art from the Cycladic islands, with ancient Greek and Byzantine art.

The Museum is in the centre of Athens, on Vas. Sofias Avenue almost opposite the National Gardens. It is an easy walk from either Evangelismos or Syntagma Metro stations. The MCA is housed in two separate buildings, which are connected by a glass-roofed corridor: the Main Building, housing the permanent collections and the New Wing, and the Stathatos Mansion, housing the temporary exhibitions.

Benaki Museum

The Benaki Museum was founded in 1930 by Antonis Benakis (1873-1954), member of a pre-eminent Greek family from Alexandria, who made an invaluable contribution to the political, social and cultural life of Greece.

Main Building

The main building is housed in the Benakis family mansion in downtown Athens, opposite the National Gardens. It is an easy walk from either Evangelismos or Syntagma Metro stations.

Exhibits cover the whole range from the Neolithic Age to the twentieth century. Many of them are masterpieces of Greek art and are of significant importance for Greek history: from antiquity and the Roman era to the Byzantine Age, from the Fall of Constantinople (1453), the period of Frankish rule and the Ottoman Occupation, to the outbreak of the Greek War of Independence (1821), and from the time of the formation of the Modern Greek State until the Asia Minor Catastrophe (1922).

Pireos St. Annexe

The new Benaki Museum building is located at 138 Pireos Street, one of the central development axes of Athens, not far from Keramikos Metro station.

The existing building, which is organised around a central courtyard, is already being refurbished, thanks to co-funding by the Ministry of Culture and the European Union. There is an amphitheatre capable of seating 300, as well as areas to house the Museum services.

Museum of Islamic Art

The Benaki Museum collection of Islamic art, which includes examples of all its local variations from as far away as India, Persia, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor, the Middle East, Arabia, Egypt, North Africa, Sicily and Spain, ranks among the most important in the world.

The evolution of Islamic civilisation from the first appearance of Islam up to the Ottoman period and the corresponding development of Islamic art up to the 19th century are demonstrated by more than 8,000 works of art, including ceramics, gold, metalwork, textiles and glass, smaller groupings of bone objects, inscribed funerary steles and weaponry, as well as the marble-faced interior of a reception room from a 17th-century Cairo mansion.

The Museum of Islamic Art is located in a neo-classical building complex donated by Lambros Eftaxias. It is in the historic centre of Athens, near the ancient Kerameikos cemetery.

Byzantine And Christian Museum

The Byzantine and Christian Museum of Athens is one of the most important public institutions in Greece, established in the early 20th century (1914) in order to collect, study, preserve and exhibit the Byzantine and Post-Byzantine cultural heritage in the Hellenic territory. It is located at 22 Vasilissis Sofias Street, in the centre of Athens.

The Museum's collections include sculpture, icons, works of arts, wall paintings, ceramics and fabrics, manuscripts, drawings and copies of Byzantine and post-Byzantine wall paintings and mosaics.

National Historical Museum Of Greece

The Old Parliament building on Stadiou Street in Athens, housed the Greek Parliament between 1875 and 1932. It now houses the country's National Historical Museum. The Museum belongs to The Historical and Ethnological Society of Greece (HESG), which was founded in 1882 for the purpose of collecting, saving and presenting relics and documentary evidence relating to modern Greek history. It is the oldest museum of its kind and it includes rich collections that highlight the most representative phases of Neo-Hellenism, from the fall of Constantinople (15th Century) on. The National Historical Museum is also a research centre for Modern Greek History.

The Museum is is located at the start of Stadiou Street, a short distance from Syntagma Square.

Museum of the City of Athens

The Museum of the City of Athens (Vouros-Eutaxias Foundation) is situated in Klafthmonos Square, off Stadiou St. in two of the capital's oldest and most beautiful buildings. The Museum's collections of paintings, engravings, sculptures, pieces of furniture and important relics of modern Greek history present a panorama of the evolution of Athens since the Frankish domination.

The Museum is halfway between the two main central squares of Syntagma and Omonoia and is an easy walk from either.