Greek Culture Online - The Politismos Museum Of Greek History & Culture

Launched in October of 2015, the Politismos Museum of Greek History is an online museum which brings ancient and contemporary Greek history and culture to a worldwide audience, with a goal to soon establish a physical museum presence in the United States. In this interview, Despina Kreatsoulas, co-founder of the Politismos Museum, discusses the idea behind the museum, its exhibits and related offerings, the museum’s future plans, and the importance of Greek culture within the global community today.

Despina Kreatsoulas: Our hope is to one day have a physical museum in Sacramento, California, and as we were looking at how we do this—I was actually doing some research for another project, at the U.S. Holocaust Museum. It’s a phenomenal museum, and what was most impressive was not the thousands of people who walk through their doors on a daily presence, but the millions of people who they reach with their online exhibits. We thought that this could potentially be a really great way to get the information out there, to build an audience, to start sharing stories, and to start building a profile for ourselves. We thought this would be the ideal way to get started, to build a presence, and to move forward.

I think, actually, that we have a few more opportunities available to us in being creative, in that if we were a physical museum, the challenge is always having a wide variety of artifacts. By being online, we can have images that reflect the stories, the history, and that type of thing. For instance, exhibits that have to do with antiquities, it would be a little difficult getting some antiquities into the United States, of course, so we’re able to use images [online]. It also allows us to get a little creative and to explore some greater things: literature, contemporary art, so we’re able to expand what we’re doing.

We’re working with a historian here in Greece and we’re producing an exhibit on the original Olympic Games, Dr. Elizabeth Whalen-Barber, who is an expert on textiles. We’re doing another one on the ancient dancers of Crete, and we also have a very special exhibit that’s going to be opening, on the Greeks who came to the United States in the early 1900s and who returned to Greece to fight for Greece during the Balkan Wars. And we have a few more that are coming, but we’ll have you visit our site to surprise you with those.

That would be great, but there are so many phenomenal museums in Greece already, that we’d like to just be able to collaborate with all of them. I think the most important thing is that we do want to collaborate and we want to expose people to the amazing things that are already happening here in Greece and the places they should be going to.

To read this article in full, please visit: Greek TV