From ideological roots to a cooler and more measured look at religion
As museums proliferate around the world and culture is evidently becoming a mechanism of politics, what is perhaps clearer than before is that museums are not value-free institutions, but the products of specific times and circumstances and also the propagators of ideologies. History shapes museums, but museums in a sense shape history as well, coloring our perception and opening up new interpretations. This reciprocal relationship, which can be seen with respect to the Byzantine and Christian Museum, is what makes the exhibition «1884-1930: From the Christian Collection to the Byzantine Museum» both unusual and highly interesting. Currently on at the above-mentioned museum and curated by Anastasia Lazaridou, it is a temporary exhibition that follows the origins and early history of the museum itself and with it, a period in Greece’s history and the ideological transformations that took place along the way. On display is an assortment of material that includes selected items from the museum’s permanent collection (some on view for the first time), photographs, documents and even audiovisual installations by contemporary artist Manthos Santorinaios, a mix that breaks down the museum to its component parts and unravels how its collection and general policy was shaped by the ideas of each director, subsidies and donations, buying policies, state support and the shifting values ascribed to Byzantine civilization. Taking the viewer behind the scenes, this retrospective shows an institution in a mood of self-appraisal while planning for the future. Among the various forthcoming projects are plans to re-exhibit its permanent collection for the year 2004. Not feasible for years, the display of the collection has gradually been made possible ever since the museum expanded to a 12,500-square-meter underground area designed by Manos Perakis and completed in 1997. This is where the current exhibition is housed and where future temporary exhibits will be held, leaving the central, historic building of Villa Ilissia (the 19th-century building which was designed by Stamatis Kleanthis for the French Duchess of Plaisance, Sophie de Marbois-Lebrun, and turned into a museum by Aristotelis Zachos in 1928) to the museum’s permanent collection of roughly 1,500 objects spanning the third to the 19th century AD. The exhibit begins in 1884 and with the museum’s progenitor, the Christian Archaeological Society (HAE). Founded by Giorgos Lambakis, HAE reflected a newly liberated country in search of a historical identity. The Byzantine period, long dismissed by Enlightenment intellectuals, was then seen in a favorable light (Byzantine studies were flourishing at the end of the 19th century) at a time that was experiencing the aftermath of romanticism and when countries like Germany were searching for their national roots in the medieval period. Besides its ideological orientation, the Christian society also had the practical objective of rescuing Christian monuments from destruction and antiquity theft and founding a museum of Christian archaeology. With the support of Princess Olga and the prestige bestowed upon it by its eminent members, who included politicians, intellectuals and archaeologists (Harilaos Trikoupis, Stefanos Dragoumis and Andreas Syngros were a few of them), HAE was considered a reputable institution with an important cause but, notwithstanding this, never managed to obtain a state subsidy or permanent accommodation. Its first exhibit was hosted at the Holy Synod, its collection was subsequently moved to the storerooms of the National Technical University of Athens and finally, to the National Archaeological Museum. It remained there until 1923 when it moved to the Byzantine and Christian Museum which had been founded some years before, in 1914. Among the collection’s rare objects, icons and manuscripts (some of them donations to the society and others obtained by Lambakis himself during his lengthy tours in Greece and Asia Minor), an odd number of items that include a reproduction of a torture instrument used on the first Christians and bottles containing herbs or gold, myrrh and incense, show Lambakis’s interest in documenting the life of the first Christians and of the Church. The angle was religious, for it tied in the history of Byzantium with that of the Church and Christianity, both of which were seen as integral to Greece’s national identity. After Lambakis died in 1914, HAE reduced its activities and gradually turned into a scientific association, which it still is. The baton was then handed over to the newly founded Byzantine and Christian Museum, an institution run by a committee and directed by Adamantios Adamantiou, professor of Byzantine art and archaeology at Athens University. Building a sound collection was the museum’s chief objective. Sculptures came from the archaeological site of Thiseion and the National Archaeological Museum and other objects from donations (Antonis Benakis, who later established his own museum, was one of the donators) purchases and through the intervention of the State, which helped collect many items from Greek Orthodox communities. The lack of permanent accommodation was a persistent problem, and when the museum had its first exhibit in 1924, it was held temporarily at the Athens Academy. But the exhibit’s scientific approach showed how the more religious values first advocated by HAE had given way to the concept of a museum whose goal was primarily educational. This scientific approach is largely the work of Giorgos Sotiriou, one of the most renowned Greek Byzantologists, who became the museum’s director in 1923 and remained in the post until 1960. Sotiriou was the first to thoroughly classify and document the museum’s collection and to present it in a structured and instructive manner. He was also a pioneer of organized excavations on Byzantine sites. Following the disastrous fire of 1917, he excavated the basilica of Aghios Dimitrios in Thessaloniki and began a restoration project that lasted 30 years. He also brought to light an early Christian city in the present-day Nea Aghialos, close to Volos, and uncovered the basilica of St. John the Theologian at Ephesus (his excavations were interrupted by the Asia Minor disaster). Sotiriou was also extremely concerned with finding permanent accommodation for the museum, a long-held objective which was finally realized when the museum moved to the Villa Ilissia. This is was in 1930, the year in which the current exhibit also closes. The date symbolizes the culmination of a course that began in 1884 and to which the present museum owes its existence.
