Exhibition layout and museographical program
In planning a museum –especially a museum for an archaeological site– one takes into account many parameters, including its purpose, layout, and requirements. Primarily, however, one is concerned with what the museum will represent. Each region had its particularities in antiquity, its strong points, for which it stood out, and these should be taken into account.
Ancient Eleutherna was not chosen fortuitously as the excavation site of the University of Crete. To the powerful image of Crete’s Minoan civilization and its palatial centres, the excavation of the city of Eleutherna would add the second component of Crete’s history: the historical period, from the Early Iron Age to the Byzantine period. Even if ancient Eleutherna unfolds its secrets from approximately 3000 BC to the 14th century AD, by a stroke of good fortune, excavations at the Orthi Petra cemetery shed light on much of the so-called ‘Dark Ages’ (9th-6th c. BC), which correspond to the dawn of Greek civilization, the period referred to by Homer in his poems the Iliad and the Odyssey. |
The finds from this cemetery illustrate the Homeric verses: the funerary pyres as described in the Iliad, particularly in the passage narrating Patroclus’s pyre (Book XXIII), thus vindicating Aristotle over Plato for accepting the epic verses as based in truth; the description of Achilles’s shield (Book XVIII); aspects of the Homeric daita (diet); but also the travels and trade contacts across the Mediterranean recounted in the Odyssey. For these reasons, the current exhibition focuses on Homer in Crete and Eleutherna. Although all periods are represented, Homer and his relation to Eleutherna is the exhibition’s backbone, connecting thread and protagonist. Museums throughout Greece showcase prehistoric and historical artefacts, but no other museum focuses on the dawn of Greek civilization and Homer. Crete can now stand firmly on two feet: the Minoan civilization and Homer. These are the strong points in its ancient history. |
ENTRANCE
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ROOM A
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ROOM B
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ROOM C
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LECTURE HALL
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