Byzantine & Christian Museum
Neoclassical villa museum of icons, frescoes and textiles tracing fifteen centuries of Byzantine art.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Byzantine & Christian Museum in Athens is built around Sophie de Marbois, the Duchess of Plaisance, whose grief after her only daughter's death led neighbors to swear they heard her holding conversations behind a locked door. It follows her decision to keep the girl's embalmed body close rather than bury it, and the hilltop tomb she commissioned at Rododaphni that burned down in 1847 before she began a grand riverside residence in the 1840s with architect Stamatios Kleanthis. Listen for the pack of enormous Pyrenean mountain dogs she kept, and the rumors that swirled around her gate.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Benaki Museum
Neoclassical mansion holding a diaspora collector's vast trove of Greek, Byzantine and Islamic art.
Basil & Elise Goulandris Foundation
Eleven-story museum of Impressionist and modern masterworks in a former neoclassical mansion.
Benaki Museum of Islamic Art
Neoclassical museum wing built around a transplanted Cairo reception room with a marble fountain.
Μουσείο της Πόλεως των Αθηνών – Ίδρυμα Βούρου-Ευταξία
Neoclassical banker's mansion that briefly served as Greece's first royal palace for a newlywed king and queen.
Numismatic Museum of Athens
Ornate nineteenth-century mansion turned coin museum, with mosaic floors evoking the fall of Troy.
Museum of Popular Art and Tradition Angeliki Hatzimichali
Neoclassical mansion of folk costumes and woodcarving, once home to a wartime resistance fighter.