Travel Guides Crafted by Experienced Archaeologists & Historians

The Thera Gallery at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens

The National Archaeological Museum in Athens is not only the largest museum in Greece, it understandably is one of the most important archaeological museums of Ancient Greece in the world. The museum has collections from all over the modern state of Greece, and beyond. Minoan frescoes and a plaster cast of a wooden bed are just some of the extraordinary artefacts in the museum’s Thera Gallery about Bronze Age Akrotiri in Santorini.

Thera Gallery Athens
The Thera Gallery in the National Archaeological Museum.
Athens Thera Gallery Artefacts
Ceramic objects from Akrotiri: a lion’s head rhyton typically with a spout at the muzzle, a female figurine, and a fragment of a jug’s spout in the form of an animal.

Pottery

Decorated Pots Thera Athens
Right, a large jar with polychrome decoration, depicting dolphins swimming between wavy lines, perhaps to give the impression of a marinescape. Left, a storage jar with relief decoration.

Metal Artefacts

Thera Metal Vessels
Bronze jugs with distinct spiral decorations.

Furniture

The charred wooden bed frame from Akrotiri now on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
A plaster cast of an undecorated wooden bed, it is possible to see evidence of the cords that would have made up the lattice netting strung from the wooden frame.

Minoan Frescoes

Building Delta and the Spring Fresco

The Spring Fresco from Thera/Akrotiri on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
The three walls of of the ‘spring fresco’ have been reconstructed in the Thera Gallery at the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.

Building Beta – Antelope & Boxers

Thera Frescoes Athens
In another room, in another house are the boxers and the antelope, thought by some to have been done by the same artist.

The Antelope

The Boxers

A composite photo of the frescoes from Akrotiri on display in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens.
A close up of the boxers and the antelope frescoes from Thera.

Add the National Archaeological Museum to Itineraries & Travel Lists

National Archaeological Museum of Athens

Greece’s National Archaeological Museum in Athens is home to some of the most well known artefacts from all over the modern nation state of Greece. From prehistory to the Romans, with special collections of Cypriot and Egyptian antiquities. The museum has been in the current building with its spectacular Neoclassical façade since the 1889, but has been expanded many times since then. With the richest collection of ancient Greek artefacts anywhere in the world, this is a must for anyone with an interest in ancient Greece.

Archaeology Travel Writer

Thomas Dowson

With a professional background in archaeology and a passion for travel, I founded Archaeology Travel to help more people explore our world’s fascinating pasts. Born in Zambia, I trained as an archaeologist at the University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa) and taught archaeology at the universities of Southampton and Manchester (England). Read More

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