Maritime Cultural Heritage

The thematic exhibition brings together a rich and diverse corpus of visual cultural material that documents the enduring relationship between the Greek world and the sea, spanning from antiquity to the present day (ca. 2150 BC to today). Drawing on content provided by a wide range of institutions—including the Hellenic Literary and Historical Archive – Cultural Foundation of the National Bank of Greece, the Aikaterini Laskaridis Foundation, the Institute of Historical Research (IHR/NHRF), the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, the National Gallery – Alexandros Soutsos Museum, MOMus, the National Documentation Centre (EKT), and numerous museums, archives, libraries, and cultural organizations across Greece—the exhibition highlights the multifaceted nature of maritime heritage. It encompasses themes such as navigation and cartography, ships and ship types, ports and coastal infrastructures, maritime professions and everyday life at sea, naval warfare, shipbuilding, maritime trade, and the cultural representations of the sea.

The exhibition is composed of photographs, postcards, maps, paintings, engravings, drawings, letters and manuscripts offering an immediate and multi-layered approach to maritime experience. Particular emphasis is placed on cartographic traditions and navigational artefacts, as well as on depictions of ships, seascapes, port environments, and maritime communities, forming a coherent narrative of maritime activity as a technological, social, and cultural phenomenon. By aggregating and contextualizing this material through the SearchCulture platform, the exhibition demonstrates the potential of digital cultural infrastructures to interlink heterogeneous collections and to support the creation of new, thematically driven narratives across institutional boundaries.