The Benaki Museum sets a standard in every respect.
The best museum of all was the Benaki, after the Babylonian riches of the National Archaeological Museum. “Best?” “What are the criteria” I hear the ever querulous reader ask? Collection, organization, display, English, toilets, café, checked bags, and shop, these figure among the criteria. It is certainly worth spending a day at this museum.
For the main museum see
http://www.benaki.gr/index-en.htm
For the annex see
http://www.benaki.gr/collections/islamic/en/
It is based on private collection, one that seems to exceed even that the Lord Leverhulme which we saw at Port Sunlight in 2004. In addition to the five or six floors on Evangelismos Street there is an annex in the Plaka devoted exclusively to Islamic Art which we also visited. It, too, had plenty of helpful information and was well laid out.
The highpoint for me was the collection of red figure vases that seemed so fresh as to have never been used, though they were more than 2,000 years old.
Although I was puzzled to see on these vases, as with nearly all of the other decorative art on pottery we saw, that the stories of the Iliad and Odyssey did not play much (any) part. Rather there were generic scenes of heroes, or prosaic matters from ordinary life. I had thought that the stories from the I and O were so ingrained that they dominated everything. Not so, it seems. This conclusion had been previously sustained by seeing the works in the Felton Bequest in Melbourne and a rather confused foray to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the scope and scale of the displays disoriented me completely; it was too much and, untutored, I did not know what to look at.
In the Islamic collection I was surprised to see representation of human beings. I thought this was proscribed in Islam. Well, evidently, not always. It is a wide world.
A travelling exhibition from the Benaki Museum was in Sydney a few years ago, and I hastened to the Power House Museum to see it. Only a few pieces, and sometimes that is easier to examine than a whole museum. There were articles from Athens that Plato or Callicles may have touched.
Shop? Did you say “shop?” Yes, the Benaki Museum has a first class museum shop and our Visa cards were exercised. We had to line up to use them, such was the demand. I bought a necktie as my Greek souvenir and an owl paperweight as below.
I dealt with Cosmo’s sister, and it took just about forever to complete the purchase. “Cosmo’s sister” you ask? Think of it this way, Cosmo was a character in a film, and he moved so slowly that he did not set off burglar alarms based on motion detectors. See “Sneakers” (1992) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0105435/
Occasionally we encounter other members of Cosmo’s family, say at the supermarket checkout in Coles.
A delegation from Iran to Greece will soon ask for the return the Islamic art that Mr Benaki took for his collection.