Top 10 Museums in Greece
Greek museums operate under a particular weight: they hold the objects that European civilisation has spent five centuries citing as its origin. The Elgin Marbles controversy is partly a story about this weight — about who has the right to hold the objects that define a cultural inheritance. But Greece's museums are also living institutions that illuminate the full depth of Mediterranean civilisation, from the Cycladic figurines of 4,000 years ago to the Byzantine treasury of Thessaloniki.
Find all of them on the map.
1. Acropolis Museum, Athens
The Acropolis Museum, designed by Bernard Tschumi Architects and opened in June 2009 at the foot of the Acropolis hill, was built specifically to provide a home for the surviving sculptures of the Parthenon and to make the case for the return of the pieces held by the British Museum. Its top-floor Parthenon Gallery — a glass-and-concrete room oriented to the same compass bearing as the Parthenon itself — displays the surviving frieze sections, metopes, and pedimental sculptures in their original positional relationship, with plaster casts marking the gaps where the British Museum holdings would fit. The ground floor is glass-panelled over the remains of a fifth-century BCE Athenian neighbourhood. Open daily except Mondays in winter; admission charged.
2. National Archaeological Museum, Athens
The National Archaeological Museum in Patission Street, Athens, founded in 1829 and housed in the current Neoclassical building since 1889, holds the largest collection of ancient Greek antiquities in the world: approximately 11,000 objects on display from over one million in storage. Its highlights include the Mask of Agamemnon (Mycenae, sixteenth century BCE), the Bronze Statue of Poseidon or Zeus from Cape Artemision (c.460 BCE), the Youth of Antikythera (c.340-330 BCE), and the complete Egyptian and Cypriot collections on the upper floor. The Thira room holds the complete Cycladic wall paintings from Akrotiri, Santorini — vivid frescoes of daily life from a Bronze Age town destroyed by the volcanic eruption of c.1627 BCE.
3. Benaki Museum, Athens
The Benaki Museum, founded in 1930 from Antonis Benakis's donation of his private collection to the Greek state, holds an encyclopedic collection of Greek material culture from prehistoric to twentieth-century objects. The main building in Koumbari Street, redesigned and expanded in 2000, covers Greek prehistoric and early historic material, Byzantine and post-Byzantine objects, Greek national period art and memorabilia, and the Benakis collection of Islamic art. Several annexes in Athens hold specialist collections: the Museum of Islamic Art in Kerameikos, the Ghika Gallery in Kolonaki, and the Pireos Street Annexe for temporary exhibitions.
4. Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens
The Byzantine and Christian Museum in Vassilissis Sofias Avenue, Athens, occupies the Villa Ilissia — an 1848 Florentine-style building — and its surrounding gardens, which were expanded with underground galleries in a 2004 renovation. The collection of over 25,000 objects covers early Christian, Byzantine, and post-Byzantine art from the fourth through the twentieth centuries, with exceptional holdings of icons, manuscripts, textiles, and liturgical objects. Its permanent exhibition sequence takes visitors from the first Christian communities through the fall of Constantinople and the survival of Byzantine traditions in post-Ottoman Greek territory — a narrative largely absent from Western European museums.
5. Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete
The Heraklion Archaeological Museum, founded in 1883 and housed in a 1930s Modernist building, holds the world's most important collection of Minoan art and civilisation from the Neolithic through the Late Minoan period. The objects recovered from the Palace of Knossos and other sites across Crete — the Snake Goddess faience figures, the bull's head rhyton in black steatite, the Phaistos Disc, the Harvester Vase in black serpentine, and the vivid Bull-Leaping fresco — have no parallel anywhere else. The museum's Minoan chronology galleries were refurbished in a major renovation completed in 2023. Open daily; admission charged; combined ticket with Knossos Palace available.
6. Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki
The Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, opened in its current building in 1962 with extensions in 1980, holds the most important collection of ancient Macedonian objects in the world: gold funeral caskets and wreaths from the royal tombs at Vergina (though the Vergina finds are split with an on-site museum), bronze vessels, carved ivory, and the gold and silver symposium equipment of fourth-century BCE Macedonian aristocracy. The Philip II of Macedon exhibition rooms are the centrepiece. The museum covers prehistory through the early Byzantine period across Macedonia, Thrace, and the northern Aegean islands.
7. Delphi Archaeological Museum
The Delphi Archaeological Museum, located immediately adjacent to the archaeological site of the Oracle of Delphi on the slopes of Mount Parnassos, holds the objects recovered from two millennia of sanctuary activity. The collection's masterpiece is the Charioteer of Delphi — a full-size bronze figure of extraordinary poise and technical mastery, cast around 478 BCE and surviving with its original glass and onyx eyes. The Naxian Sphinx, the metopes of the Athenian Treasury, and the remarkable series of kouros figures from the sixth century BCE complete a collection that is compact, focused, and uniformly of the highest quality. Open daily; combined ticket with the archaeological site.
8. Archaeological Museum of Olympia
The Archaeological Museum of Olympia, sited beside the ancient sanctuary where the Olympic Games were held from 776 BCE, holds the sculptural programme of the Temple of Zeus (c.470-456 BCE) — the most complete surviving pedimental sculpture from the Classical period — as well as the Nike of Paionios, the Hermes and the Infant Dionysus attributed to Praxiteles, and the extraordinary collection of bronze helmets dedicated as trophies after military victories, some still bearing inscriptions recording the battle. The reconstruction of the east and west pediments in full scale is among the most effective presentations of ancient sculpture anywhere.
9. Museum of Cycladic Art, Athens
The Museum of Cycladic Art in Neophytou Douka Street, Athens, founded in 1986 from the Nicholas and Dolly Goulandris collection, holds the finest private collection of Cycladic figurines in the world: approximately 350 marble figures from the Early Bronze Age Aegean (c.3200-2000 BCE), their abstract, planar forms so strikingly modern that they influenced Brancusi and Picasso. The museum also holds significant ancient Greek and Cypriot material; a 1992 expansion joined the original house to the adjacent neoclassical Stathatos Mansion. The Goulandris collection represents one of the last major assembled private collections of Cycladic material; exports are now prohibited.
10. National Gallery — Alexandros Soutzos Museum, Athens
The National Gallery of Greece in Vassileos Konstantinou Avenue, founded in 1900 and named after its first major donor Alexandros Soutzos, holds the principal collection of Greek painting and sculpture from the post-Byzantine period to the present. A major renovation and expansion completed in 2021 tripled the gallery's display area. The collection's strength lies in nineteenth-century Greek academicism — Nikephoros Lytras, Nikolaos Gyzis, and Georgios Jakobides — alongside twentieth-century works by Nikos Hadjikyriakos-Ghika and the major Greek Expressionists, as well as a significant collection of European old masters including works by El Greco, who was born in Crete.