To read the press release in Greek please click here.

The Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports highlights the relationship between the sea and Greek Culture, by participating with a booth in “Posidonia 2022”. Following a four-year hiatus, this year’s opening of the international shipping exhibition, showcasing 1900 exhibitors from 87 countries, will take place on Monday, June 6th, at the Metropolitan Expo exhibition centre.

As stated by Minister Lina Mendoni, “The Ministry of Culture and Sports is very pleased to take part in this unique exhibition, celebrating the relationship between man and sea. The Greek Seas lie between Europe and the East. With their hundreds of islands, large and small, for six thousand years they have been bearers of goods, ideas, culture. From the western Ionian islands to the coast of Asia Minor, the Greek seas allowed the transport of trade from one continent to the other, and have been a source of inspiration and creativity, founding and developing an outstanding culture – a civilization it later bequeathed to Mankind”.

With its booth, the Ministry of Culture and Sports seeks to convey a vivid image of the influence the Greek Seas have exerted upon Greek art, civilization and growth throughout the centuries. Light and colour, variety and contrast, austerity and wealth are its distinctive traits. Here nature and man worked together in close harmony to create the very center of Greek civilization. This booth, a small visual sample comprising three parts, stems from our belief in the inestimable cultural contribution of the Greek Seas to Greece and the world. 

The first part presents in a series of photographs (taken by professional and amateur photographers-divers) during underwater excavations and surveys of the Ephorate of Underwater Antiquities in recent years from shipwrecks dated from antiquity to the 20th century.

The second part is a collection of illustrations from Greek museums that show the influence and interaction of the sea with the Greek civilization in all aspects of human activity (architecture, art, traditional arts and crafts, maritime, photography), as well as a collection of publications and replicas that are related to the Greek Seas throughout the ages. A major part of this exhibition is dedicated to the Cultural Routes Programme of the Council of Europe and some of the Greek sites listed in the World Heritage Catalogue of UNESCO.

In the center of the exhibition stands an impressive exact copy of Poseidon (or Zeus), an almost intact bronze statue, ca. 460 BC, a masterpiece of Greek Classical sculpture, found in a Roman shipwreck off cape Artemision, Euboea, during the 1920s, now exhibited in the National Archaeological Museum, Athens.