The Competitiveness Programme (2014-2020 NSRF) provided practical support to Greece’s museums, bolstering their role as living repositories of culture, knowledge and lived experience.
Thanks to the Competitiveness Programme’s co-financed actions, extensive digital upgrades were made to museum infrastructure which included the adoption of modern technologies to improve the digital experience of visitors and to digitally record collections. At the same time, accessibility was significantly improved by implementing solutions that ensure equal opportunities for people with disabilities. In addition, emphasis was placed on showcasing tourism sites via targeted promotional programmes and partnerships to increase visitor numbers and promote cultural heritage at international level.
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📍 Some indicative examples of museums which were upgraded with the support of the European Union and monumental collections which were successfully organised and digitised:
Archaeological Museum of Alexandroupolis
Budget: €2,832,806
The exhibitions at the Archaeological Museum of Alexandroupolis include finds from settlements and cemeteries in the wider area, offering visitors a comprehensive picture of Thrace’s cultural development over the centuries. As part of the project, a new building to house the Archaeological Museum was erected, the grounds were landscaped and the permanent exhibition was put on display, the antiquities were conserved and the storage area was organised.
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Archaeological Museum of Delos
Budget: €2,300,265
The Archaeological Museum of Delos is one of the most important museums in Greece, primarily due to the unique historical importance of the island of Delos as a sacred site of the ancient Greeks and an important commercial and religious centre in antiquity. The innovation and originality of the project lie in the intervention itself, which shapes and improves public-service facilities and preserves and highlights emblematic monuments of the archaeological site on an island with no modern settlements, where there are adverse living conditions and significant technical challenges in setting up a complex worksite.
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Chios Mastic Museum with digital applications
Budget: €691,348
The Chios Mastic Museum is an important venue highlighting the productive history of growing and processing mastic gum, which is part of the cultural landscape of the island of Chios. Since 2014 traditional mastic cultivation has been included in UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity, with particular emphasis on the timelessness and sustainability of this product from Chios.
https://www.piop.gr/diktuo-mouseion/mouseio-mastihas-hiou/
Ioannina Silversmithing Museum
Budget: €354,204
The purpose of the project is to preserve knowledge about silversmithing in Epirus, to disseminate information about the technology used to the general public, and to link this technology to the social features of the age in which it developed and flourished.
https://www.piop.gr/diktuo-mouseion/mouseio-argurotehnias/
Jewish Museum of Greece
Budget: €703,824
Implementation of the project included digitising and documenting collections, creating a system for indexing, storing and managing collections and implementing a VR interactive narrative experience based on facts, testimonies and experiences of the Greek Jewish community during the Second World War.
Athens City Museum
Budget: €565,987
The museum’s collections were digitised and documented, and a digital exhibition space and multi-criteria content search tool were created. Interactive applications offer a new experiential approach to interpreting the exhibits, encouraging repeated visits to both the museum’s physical and online space. The project is particularly aimed at school pupils, integrating modern digital technologies into their cultural education.
Kostas Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology
Budget: €342,346
The Kostas Kotsanas Museum of Ancient Greek Technology showcases its exhibits using innovative digital media and augmented reality technologies, digital visualisation and 3D representation of digital materials. The digitisation methods used to select representative exhibits at the museum are spherical photographic rendering of the exhibits and 3D modelling. The 3D digital exhibits produced were utilised via: a) online exhibitions, b) a digital tour guide application, c) augmented reality technologies and d) a virtual overflight application.
Development, showcasing and utilisation of the National Theatre’s digital cultural repository
Budget: €597,928.00
The project enriches existing digital collections of programmes, publications, photographs, audio documents, video recordings and other files by digitising three new collections. These include collections of the most important costumes (400) from the collection of historical costumes which have been declared to be ‘monuments of modern culture’, historical photographs (1,000) and posters (250), stage scenery and rooms in the Ziller Building, and complement the existing collections of programmes, photographs and publications with material from performances for the years 2006-2021.
The documentation scheme has been upgraded by adopting international standards, supporting interoperability, is multilingual now with all documentation translated into English, is further organised and supported by ontologies and multilingual thesaurus. Among other things, the existing online digital archive is being technologically upgraded to support new digitised collections, easier navigation and search, as well as modern technologies that support the multi-channel interface for smart phones and tablets. Lastly, the digital file will incorporate a chatbot, a smart interactive system based on artificial intelligence, that will allow visitors to obtain information about the National Theatre’s theatrical productions using natural language queries.
Teloglion Foundation
Budget: €481,489
The Teloglion Foundation for the Arts is one of the most important cultural institutions in Thessaloniki and Northern Greece, with a strong emphasis on the visual arts, education and preservation of cultural heritage. The scope of the project entitled “Digitising Art and Cultural Heritage for lived experiences via innovative technologies” is to design and develop targeted experiential actions and model apps to showcase the Teloglion Foundation’s permanent collection to the general public and to specialised groups of visitors. It is also possible to bolster and expand training workshops into individual groups.
Vasilis and Marina Theoharakis Foundation
Budget: €276,302.00
The aim is to promote the work of the very important painter, Spyros Papaloukas, and how it affected artists in the 1930s. More specifically, the project includes digitising and documenting paintings, drawings and personal items of S. Papaloukas and scanning the interior and exterior of the building housing the Foundation. The actions to showcase the digitised materials relate to the development of a new portal, a 360o virtual tour of the building and augmented reality apps based on paintings by S. Papaloukas. Among other things, the project also includes the creation of a virtual exhibition, while at the same time an e-ticketing tool is being created to support the online sale of tickets, both through the foundation’s website and through social networks.
Museum of Boatbuilding and Maritime Crafts of the Aegean
Budget: €3,455,147
The second phase of the creation of the thematic Museum of Boatbuilding and Maritime Crafts of the Aegean focused on the development of the boatbuilding and maritime art of the Aegean islands. The museum’s operation contributes significantly to preserving and protecting relics and testimonies, as well as to experiential engagement and to preserving knowledge and emotions. In addition to the outdoor exhibition area, the building has workshop spaces, a library, offices for research and educational programmes, an events hall, and facilities for visitors. As part of the project’s implementation, objects and tools that now form part of the exhibits were acquired, restored, and used to equip the Museum.
Development of a digital museum for the Holy Metropolis of Syros and digitisation of collections
Budget: €448,508.00
This is an important project for religious culture and tourism in Greece which includes digitising, processing and scientifically documenting the objects in the collections of the Holy Metropolis of Syros and the Holy Monastery of the Theotokos Tourliani, which date from 1830 onwards. As part of the project, an integrated digital collection management system and a series of digital applications were procured and installed, including virtual guides, interactive timelines, virtual tours and a digital portrait of key figures from the Holy Metropolis of Syros.
https://digitalmuseum.keaimsyrou.gr/el-gr/
Another very important project is the Archaeological Cadastre, with a budget of €2,965,767; this is a cross-cutting project to protect the cultural environment, that promotes and showcases scientific work, supports education, facilitates information for citizens and contributes to the digital transformation of the public administration, and the Digitisation of moveable monuments and development of new information system for the National Archive of Monuments, with a budget of €7,403,274, which is related to the creation of an Integrated Information System to record, document and manage Greece’s cultural heritage.
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