Greek museum nominated for top European Honours

INTERVIEW THEBES MUSEUM 02

Greek museum

The Archaeological Museum of Thebes, in Viotia, central Greece, has been nominated for the European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) 2018 along with 40 other nominees.

The Archaeological Museum of Thebes occupies an exhibition area of 1,000 m2 and houses artifacts representing millennia of continuous human activity in Viotia, also related to the myths associated with the area.

The annual ceremony is held under the auspices of the Council of Europe and will take place this year on May 9-12, at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw, where all candidate museums will make an audiovisual presentation, before the winner is announced.

The presentation of the Thebes Museum will be supported by the “Society of the Friends of The Archaeological Museum of Thebes”.

Greek museum

The European Museum of the Year Award (EMYA) was founded in 1977, by the now legendary Kenneth Hudson and Richard Hoggart, under the auspices of the Council of Europe, with the aim of recognising excellence in the European museum sector, and of encouraging innovative processes in a museum world, which still took the more traditional view of focusing on collections rather than on their use for the benefit of society.

EMYA has had a significant influence on the lives of many museum professionals and has brought to centre stage museums with highly innovative approaches, which came to have a significant influence in the national and international museum field. Within the EMYA scheme all museums are equal, whether public or private, small or large. And whatever their subject or their nationality, they are assessed on the basis of their outstanding public quality and innovative practices.

Since 1977, the European Museum Forum, as the longest running and most prestigious museum award scheme, has presented the European Museum of the Year Award and a series of related awards, and functioned as a continuous benchmark for best practices for the sector. Innovation, public quality and accessibility are the absolute criteria for the EMYA award and constitute the shared denominators for all the awards in the scheme. 

Every year, a rigorous judging process involves visits to up to 50 museums, culminating in an annual conference with up to 300 leading museum professionals, at which the candidates present their museums, the winners are announced, and the underlying values and innovative ideas in the European museum field are discussed, renewed and reinterpreted.

GCT Team

This article was researched and written by a GCT team member.