The Benaki Museum
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The Benaki Museum ranks as one of the oldest and most significant museums in Greece.
It is located within 5 minutes walking distance from the Syntagma Metro station in the fashionable
Kolonaki district, right across the lush National Gardens and the garden of the Presidential
Mansion, and close to the Museum of Cycladic Art and the Byzantine and Christian Museum.
The Benaki Museum occupies one of the few neoclassical buildings that remain in Athens.
The museum's constant expansion has led to three significant locations worth visiting.
In the Museum's neoclassical building, only the collections that "narrate" the history
of Hellenism over time are displayed in an enriched form.
This group of collections comprises many distinct categories totaling more than 40,000 items,
illustrating the character of the Greek world from antiquity and the age of Roman domination
to the medieval Byzantine period.
From the fall of Constantinople (1453) and the centuries of Frankish and Ottoman occupation
to the outbreak of the struggle for independence in 1821 and from the formation of the modern
state of Greece (1830) down to 1922, the year in which the Asia Minor disaster took place.
The ground floor, where the visitors' entrance and exit are located, accommodates the first
Museum Gift Shop in Greece, while on the terrace there is a Restaurant-Snack Bar, also the
first in Greece with a spectacular view.
