CULTURE

Ottoman Thrace as seen in a rare collection of photographs and texts by Georgios Lambakis

The Georgios Lambakis collection, which is currently on display at the Folk History Museum of the Komotini Educational Foundation in northern Greece, presents a series of photographs – rare historical archival testimonies – of the region of Thrace and the collector’s journey from there to Constantinople in the early 20th century. The exhibition was inaugurated last week within the context of an international symposium titled «Byzantine Thrace: Testimonies and Remnants.» There are 50 photographs on display at the museum, showing what Lambakis himself saw when he began his tour of Macedonia in 1902, on the orders of the Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Education. At the researcher’s own initiative, he extended his tour to Thrace which, then still a part of the Ottoman Empire, retained some of the glorious monuments of its past. His travel journals, which were loaned to the Folk History Museum by Ioannis Lambakis, are just as valuable as the photographs, containing rare documentations of monuments that no longer exist or that have undergone numerous renovations or changes in use over the years. Among the monuments that no longer exist are descriptions of the churches of Zoodochou Pigis, Aghios Georgios of Neoceasaria, the Madonna and Aghios Evplous. The exhibition will be moving to Xanthi on May 24 to the House of Arts and Letters, before coming to Athens’s Byzantine and Christian Museum.

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