NAM’s elegant neoclassical premises have their own interesting, sometimes dramatic history. Before NAM’s foundation stone was laid in 1866, Athens’ antiquities were being stored and viewed in a number of convenient empty buildings around the city, including an old Ottoman-era house on the Acropolis – really the first Acropolis Museum – the Hephaisteion (temple of Hephaistos and Athena) in the Athenian Agora; and the Tower of the Winds in the Roman Agora. Earlier, Greece’s very first archaeological museum had been established in 1829 and housed in an orphanage on Aegina island. By the late 1880s, however, the NAM had been erected and all the scattered artifacts were brought together under one roof, with the building originally being called the Central Archaeological Museum.

Over subsequent decades, more wings were added and the museum flourished – until World War II caused NAM’s curators to take extraordinary measures to protect Greece’s irreplaceable heritage. Many of NAM’s most familiar exhibits, such as the great bronze Zeus/Poseidon figure throwing a thunderbolt/trident, were wrapped, boxed and buried in pits dug beneath the museum’s floors. Other objects were hidden elsewhere, even in caves and other secret places unknown to invading enemy forces.

Of particular note is the so-called “temporary” exhibition of finds from the mid-first-century BC Antikythera Shipwreck, inaugurated in 2012, which has proven so popular among NAM’s visitors that it has been granted something of a permanent status. Let’s hope it continues that way, as this is one the most intriguing, well presented, visually stunning displays of artifacts from an ancient shipwreck that you will find anywhere in the world. Of particular note is the over-life-size bronze statue of the Antikythera Youth (ca. 340-330 BC), specially cleaned and gleaming for this exhibition; the encrusted and eroded stone statues once only partly protected beneath the sandy seabed; and the Antikythera Device – a sophisticated astronomical and planetary tracker, combined with several other calendrical functions, which essentially represents the world’s first computer.