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FREQUENT QUESTIONS
What is the Benaki Museum Shop?
The Benaki Museum, which has today expanded into three buildings, operates three Shops: in the main building at 1 Koumbari St, in the Pireos St building and in the Museum of Islamic Art at Asomaton and Dipylou.
The first museum shop to open in Greece was the Shop in the Benaki Museum's main building (1 Koumbari St), established in 1977, which since then has provided financial support for the Museum's activities, covering a large part of its total budget.
With the primary aim of "disseminating" museum objects through the reproduction and sale of replicas to many buyers, the people in charge of the Shop have selected representative and ageless objects from among the countless museum exhibits, and have had them reproduced in a responsible and artistic way. Today it is easy for the public both in Greece and abroad to acquire these faithful replicas of museum exhibits.
An equally significant aim of the Shop is to preserve traditional techniques that are disappearing, and to support the artisans who use them. The religious paintings sold in the Shop, for example, are created using the techniques of Byzantine artists, and its jewellery has been made with techniques that have now vanished.
Inspired by the permanent exhibits in the Museum, a number of talented young artists have created objects of exceptional interest, recreating old motifs and decorative themes, and bringing old-time objects "back to life" in an entirely different form, sometimes venturing to use revolutionary applications with delightful results.
In 2004, the Benaki Museum opened its new building on Pireos St, a multi-purpose centre in which exhibitions are mounted and a wide variety of events are held in a modern venue devoted to contemporary artistic expression.
It goes without saying that the Shop has followed the Museum to its new location and has opened a branch in the Pireos St building.
Retaining the same primary goal, i.e. to provide financial support for the Museum's activities, but differing from the initial Shop in the main museum building in terms of the thinking behind it, the new shop in the Benaki Museum's building on Pireos St selects mainly original artistic creations. The result of this effort has been to create a centre for the contemporary applied arts, shaping public taste and offering people an opportunity to acquire selected works by young Greek artists. The Pireos St Shop is a centre in which contemporary applied arts objects are exhibited, bringing the public in contact with selected works of high aesthetics, superb workmanship and special artistic inspiration. In our new venue, we are trying to gather together the best that Greece has to offer in the applied arts field, thus carrying on its rich artistic tradition. Forgotten techniques and themes find contemporary applications or are combined with motifs from other cultures.
The artists (designers-producers) who create works exclusively for the Benaki Museum and present them at the shop on Pireos St all have something special to offer in terms of either technique or inspiration. Some apply primitive and traditional techniques, in which tradition is used in an absolutely modern form.
Greece's Museum of Islamic Art, one of the few in the Western world to feature the culture of Islamic countries, has been housed for the past four years in the neoclassical building in the Keramikos Building Complex.
Given the Shop's primary and constant aim of producing and selling replicas of selected Benaki Museum exhibits for the financial support of the Foundation's activities, we also expanded into this new venue, by opening a small shop that displays typical artefacts of Islamic art. We have selected representative objects of perennial value from the Museum collections, and have reproduced them with respect and artistry.
We continued our interest in old, vanishing techniques, as well as in the people who still use them in their distant homeland. The objects on sale at the Museum of Islamic Art shop include, for example, "Iznik" tiles that revive, after an interval of 300 years, the technique with which the famous wall tiles were made in the 16th-century; textiles (cushions and bags) made in Egypt; jewellery crafted using the Koudan technique in India, but also with materials from Morocco, India and Ethiopia; useful objects and pottery decorated with motifs and techniques from the East, as well as dolls in traditional Pakistani dress made in their own land.
I would like to give one of your products as a gift. Should I ask for it to be gift wrapped?
All objects purchased from our on-line shop are gift wrapped and accompanied by an explanatory description in Greek and English.
I am interested in buying some things as corporate gifts, but I would like more information.
Please contact us as sales-shop@benaki.gr or at 0030-210 3671000 for any further information you may require.
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