In the context of a on a significant long-term collaboration with Benaki Museum, the Hellenic Museum of Melbourne, a museum which represents Greek civilization in the city with the largest Greek expat community in the world, presents the exhibition “Gods, Myths and Mortals: Greek Treasures Across the Millennia,” and sets up a ‘little Benaki Museum’ inside its premises.

The exhibition, which opened on September 10, is laid out in the same way as the permanent collections in the main Benaki Museum building and offers a manageable, yet comprehensive, picture of the span of Greek civilization.

According to the official site of Benaki Museum, the aim of the exhibition is to highlight the unbroken continuity and unity of Hellenism, from earliest prehistory to the Classical and Hellenistic years, from the Roman era to the end of the Byzantine period, and through the centuries of foreign rule up to the revolutionary revival of 1821 and the founding of the Modern Greek state.
In this Benaki Museum exhibition various aspects of everyday life and religious expression are presented together with documents about social and political organization, in order to encapsulate a narrative about the development of Greek civilization.

To achieve the most comprehensive presentation of this narrative, the curators of the Benaki Museum have selected 201 objects from all the Greek collections of the Museum: utensils, vessels, figurines, statuettes and jewelry dating from the prehistoric, ancient Greek and Roman periods.

Benaki Museum has announced that the exhibition will remain in Melbourne for the next five years (with the option of extending its stay) so that the many members of the Greek Diaspora can enjoy it and to serve the purposes of the hosting Museum, an institution whose aim is to study and demonstrate the contribution of Hellenism to history and art.

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