The Benaki Museum

Antonis Benakis founded the Benaki Museum in 1930. Ever since it has been considered one of the basic elements of museum resources of Greece. Benaki Museum was created to demonstrate the interest presented by the reality of Greek culture, particularly in post-Byzantine and modern times. However to attain this aim it was essential to provide the possibility of critical comparison with works from antiquity and the Byzantine period, as well as with examples of other civilizations that flourished in adjacent lands. By means such as this, the inner cohesion which characterises the apparently discrete collections in the Museum may be made plain, while the demand to come to grips with the world of Islam is expressed, in a prefatory manner, for the first time.

Consistent with the above, it is around the two fundamental but distinct axes of the Greek and Islamic civilizations, linked by the unity comprising works of Coptic art, that the Museum substantially revolves. Outside this dual scheme lies the Chinese ceramics collection as an instance of the concern shown for the promotion of an artistic understanding and for spiritual culture in general.