All I ever wanted to know about numismatics and was afraid to ask.
Got any spare change?
The Numismatic Museum is in Heinrich Schliemann’s Mansion on Panepistimiou Street. The building is very impressive and was as much the centre of my attention as the displays. The displays are mainly about coins. I found it instructive, especially the maps that showed the diffusion of coins in the ancient world.
The inflation that ravaged the Byzantine Empire is beautifully realized by a display of coins over nearly a thousand year period showing the changing metallic content, as well as size and shape, all to use less of precious metals. The end result was coins so thin and weak that they wore concave from use.
There was also a little about the Euro. I realized that national symbols are on the obverse side of the one Euro coin. I had once thought national symbols were on the bills but could never find them since the ones I saw all looked alike, whether from Germany, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and now Greece. Doh! Coins not notes! The Athena’s owl is the national symbol on one Euro coins minted in Greece. I expect this is like making the maple leaf the Canadian national symbol when 95% of all maple trees grow in two of the ten provinces, or calling the Netherlands by the name of one of its five provinces, Holland. I’ll let them all sort that out, and I kept a couple of Euro coins as part of my owl collection.
More impressive still was the house that Schliemann built. He was the excavator of Troy. He dug up that mask of Agamemnon featured in Night at the Museum on this blog. The house reflects his obsession with Troy. Passages from the Iliad are painted on the walls above most doors. No photographs allowed, so I cannot insert examples. One story is that he married his wife because she could recite the Odyssey. Be that as it may their two children were named Andromache and Agamemnon. At their baptism, another story goes, he placed a copy of the Iliad on them and himself recited hexameters from it to complete the ceremony. Obsessed?
Outside in the small garden were some very large insects.
Here is a statue from the garden.
This is one side of the stairway up to the main entrance.
The building houses a research centre as well as the museum. See http://odysseus.culture.gr/h/1/eh151.jsp?obj_id=3368
It had a pathetic shop, and though we tried, we could not Visa it.