The museum
The Byzantine Museum of Veroia is
housed in a newly renovated industrial building located in the heritage listed
district of Kiriotissa. The building was founded in the early 20th century by
Stergios Markos, a doctor educated in Bucharest. It housed a roller flour mill powered
by water from a tributary of the River Tripotamos, which ran along the south
side. The building is a typical example of industrial architecture at the time
and originally stood four storeys high. The walls were of local limestone and
strong mortar, reinforced with hewn cornerstones, and the floors and roof of
wood, mounted on a metal frame of cast iron on the perimeter walls. The flour mill
operated until the 1960's, and the building suffered a fire in 1981.
Now renovated, the museum comprises a ground floor with a gift shop, conservation
lab, storage spaces, areas for educational programmes, exhibitions and lectures,
and three upper floors totalling 720m2, each of which houses a conceptually
separate section of the permanent exhibition. The objects in the permanent
exhibition are part of a rich collection of icons, frescoes from churches,
mosaics from secular and religious buildings, manuscripts and incunabula,
ceramics and miniatures, coins and wood carvings, burial goods, architectural
sculptures and inscriptions.
In particular, the first floor exhibition
presents the main features of Byzantine culture as exemplified by Veroia, a
regional city in the Empire with a wealth of history and noteworthy monuments,
and its diverse cultural relations with Constantinople
and Thessaloniki, the major centres in the Byzantine world, as well as with
other cities in Macedonia. Frames of reference for studying communication
between them are Constantinople, as expressing
output at the centre of the Empire, Thessaloniki, following trends in the
capital, and Kastoria, a parallel example of a regional city. Links between the
cities are traced with regard to worship, art, financial and commercial
transactions, as well as to human resources, i.e. the itinerant artists who contributed
to the spread of ideas, aesthetic values and ideological currents in the empire.
The museum programme is complemented by a presentation of public and private
life in the city (on the second floor), and is rounded off with a portrayal of
worship as represented by the features to be found where it was practised, as
well as by the human perception of sanctity and the Divine (on the third floor).
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