About Santorini museums

Visitors of Santorini have the chance to admire monuments of unique beauty at the numerous museums available around the island. The Museum of the Pre-historic Thira hosts, together with many relative items, discoveries from excavations at the area of Akrotiri, from the older excavations of the German Archeological Institute at Potamos and from excavations all across the island. This exhibition aims to offer to the visitors a full view of Santorini at the pre-historic era, together with its dynamic and creative aspects which made this island one of the most important Aegean centers of the 17th and the 18th centuries B.C. At the Museum of the Pre-historic Thira, you will find discoveries and tapestries from the Modern Neolithic Era. Through these the visitors can create a picture of the many different civilizations that passed from Santorini. Almost all items are very well preserved.

At the Petros Nomikos Conference Center and, more specifically, at the Thira Foundation "Petros M. Nomikos" there are numerous reproductions of the tapestries found at Akrotiri in normal size. These impressive reproductions had been constructed with a method invented by KODAK Pathe and developed by the French company TRANSFER RELIEF. The Foundation is located at Firostefani.

The Naval Museum of Thira, at Oia, aims to describe the great naval history of Santorini throughout the centuries but mostly its route at the 19th century. Back then the ships from Santorini used to sail all across the Mediterranean Sea and the Black Sea exchanging goods and creating civilization. At 1951, a captain named Antonis Dakoronias, had the idea of establishing this museum and gave some of his own items from his ship to begin with. Today, visitors may find several different items such as maps, old and rare documents, books, items of every day use while living on a ship, watermarks, cases etc.

The current Archeological Museum was established in 1960 in order to replace the one founded in 1902 and was destroyed by earthquakes in 1956. There visitors may adire sculptures and signs from the Archaic up to the Roman eras, together with ceramic and crockery items from the Geometrical up to the Hellenistic eras.