1.
Neoclassical architecture
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Neoclassical architecture is an architectural style produced by the neoclassical movement that began in the mid-18th century. In its purest form, it is a style derived from the architecture of classical antiquity, the Vitruvian principles. In form, Neoclassical architecture emphasizes the wall rather than chiaroscuro, Neoclassical architecture is still designed today, but may be labelled New Classical Architecture for contemporary buildings. In Central and Eastern Europe, the style is referred to as Classicism. Many early 19th-century neoclassical architects were influenced by the drawings and projects of Étienne-Louis Boullée, the many graphite drawings of Boullée and his students depict spare geometrical architecture that emulates the eternality of the universe. There are links between Boullées ideas and Edmund Burkes conception of the sublime, the baroque style had never truly been to the English taste. The most popular was the four-volume Vitruvius Britannicus by Colen Campbell, the book contained architectural prints of famous British buildings that had been inspired by the great architects from Vitruvius to Palladio. At first the book featured the work of Inigo Jones. Palladian architecture became well established in 18th-century Britain, at the forefront of the new school of design was the aristocratic architect earl, Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington, in 1729, he and William Kent, designed Chiswick House. This House was a reinterpretation of Palladios Villa Capra, but purified of 16th century elements and this severe lack of ornamentation was to be a feature of the Palladianism. In 1734 William Kent and Lord Burlington designed one of Englands finest examples of Palladian architecture with Holkham Hall in Norfolk, the main block of this house followed Palladios dictates quite closely, but Palladios low, often detached, wings of farm buildings were elevated in significance. This classicising vein was also detectable, to a degree, in the Late Baroque architecture in Paris. This shift was even visible in Rome at the redesigned façade for S, by the mid 18th century, the movement broadened to incorporate a greater range of Classical influences, including those from Ancient Greece. The shift to neoclassical architecture is conventionally dated to the 1750s, in France, the movement was propelled by a generation of French art students trained in Rome, and was influenced by the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann. The style was adopted by progressive circles in other countries such as Sweden. A second neoclassic wave, more severe, more studied and more consciously archaeological, is associated with the height of the Napoleonic Empire, in France, the first phase of neoclassicism was expressed in the Louis XVI style, and the second in the styles called Directoire or Empire. The Scottish architect Charles Cameron created palatial Italianate interiors for the German-born Catherine II the Great in St. Petersburg, indoors, neoclassicism made a discovery of the genuine classic interior, inspired by the rediscoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum. These had begun in the late 1740s, but only achieved an audience in the 1760s
2.
Museum
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Most large museums are located in major cities throughout the world and more local ones exist in smaller cities, towns and even the countryside. Museums have varying aims, ranging from serving researchers and specialists to serving the general public, the goal of serving researchers is increasingly shifting to serving the general public. There are many types of museums, including art museums, natural history museums, science museums, war museums, the city with the largest number of museums is Mexico City with over 128 museums. According to The World Museum Community, there are more than 55,000 museums in 202 countries, the English museum comes from the Latin word, and is pluralized as museums. The first museum/library is considered to be the one of Plato in Athens, however, Pausanias gives another place called Museum, namely a small hill in Classical Athens opposite to the Akropolis. The hill was called Mouseion after Mousaious, a man who used to sing on the hill, the purpose of modern museums is to collect, preserve, interpret, and display items of artistic, cultural, or scientific significance for the education of the public. The purpose can also depend on ones point of view, to a family looking for entertainment on a Sunday afternoon, a trip to a local history museum or large city art museum could be a fun, and enlightening way to spend the day. To city leaders, a healthy museum community can be seen as a gauge of the health of a city. To a museum professional, a museum might be seen as a way to educate the public about the museums mission, Museums are, above all, storehouses of knowledge. In 1829, James Smithsons bequest, that would fund the Smithsonian Institution, stated he wanted to establish an institution for the increase, Museums of natural history in the late 19th century exemplified the Victorian desire for consumption and for order. Gathering all examples of classification of a field of knowledge for research. As American colleges grew in the 19th century, they developed their own natural history collections for the use of their students, while many large museums, such as the Smithsonian Institution, are still respected as research centers, research is no longer a main purpose of most museums. While there is a debate about the purposes of interpretation of a museums collection, there has been a consistent mission to protect. Much care, expertise, and expense is invested in efforts to retard decomposition in aging documents, artifacts, artworks. All museums display objects that are important to a culture, as historian Steven Conn writes, To see the thing itself, with ones own eyes and in a public place, surrounded by other people having some version of the same experience can be enchanting. Museum purposes vary from institution to institution, some favor education over conservation, or vice versa. For example, in the 1970s, the Canada Science and Technology Museum favored education over preservation of their objects and they displayed objects as well as their functions. One exhibit featured a printing press that a staff member used for visitors to create museum memorabilia
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Greece
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Greece, officially the Hellenic Republic, historically also known as Hellas, is a country in southeastern Europe, with a population of approximately 11 million as of 2015. Athens is the capital and largest city, followed by Thessaloniki. Greece is strategically located at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, situated on the southern tip of the Balkan peninsula, it shares land borders with Albania to the northwest, the Republic of Macedonia and Bulgaria to the north, and Turkey to the northeast. Greece consists of nine regions, Macedonia, Central Greece, the Peloponnese, Thessaly, Epirus, the Aegean Islands, Thrace, Crete. The Aegean Sea lies to the east of the mainland, the Ionian Sea to the west, the Cretan Sea and the Mediterranean Sea to the south. Greece has the longest coastline on the Mediterranean Basin and the 11th longest coastline in the world at 13,676 km in length, featuring a vast number of islands, eighty percent of Greece is mountainous, with Mount Olympus being the highest peak at 2,918 metres. From the eighth century BC, the Greeks were organised into various independent city-states, known as polis, which spanned the entire Mediterranean region and the Black Sea. Greece was annexed by Rome in the second century BC, becoming a part of the Roman Empire and its successor. The Greek Orthodox Church also shaped modern Greek identity and transmitted Greek traditions to the wider Orthodox World, falling under Ottoman dominion in the mid-15th century, the modern nation state of Greece emerged in 1830 following a war of independence. Greeces rich historical legacy is reflected by its 18 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, among the most in Europe, Greece is a democratic and developed country with an advanced high-income economy, a high quality of life, and a very high standard of living. A founding member of the United Nations, Greece was the member to join the European Communities and has been part of the Eurozone since 2001. Greeces unique cultural heritage, large industry, prominent shipping sector. It is the largest economy in the Balkans, where it is an important regional investor, the names for the nation of Greece and the Greek people differ from the names used in other languages, locations and cultures. The earliest evidence of the presence of human ancestors in the southern Balkans, dated to 270,000 BC, is to be found in the Petralona cave, all three stages of the stone age are represented in Greece, for example in the Franchthi Cave. Neolithic settlements in Greece, dating from the 7th millennium BC, are the oldest in Europe by several centuries and these civilizations possessed writing, the Minoans writing in an undeciphered script known as Linear A, and the Mycenaeans in Linear B, an early form of Greek. The Mycenaeans gradually absorbed the Minoans, but collapsed violently around 1200 BC and this ushered in a period known as the Greek Dark Ages, from which written records are absent. The end of the Dark Ages is traditionally dated to 776 BC, the Iliad and the Odyssey, the foundational texts of Western literature, are believed to have been composed by Homer in the 7th or 8th centuries BC. With the end of the Dark Ages, there emerged various kingdoms and city-states across the Greek peninsula, in 508 BC, Cleisthenes instituted the worlds first democratic system of government in Athens
4.
Vitaliano Poselli
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Vitaliano Poselli was an Italian architect from Sicily, mostly known for his work in the city of Thessaloniki in northern Greece. He was born in Castiglione di Sicilia in 1838, and studied in Rome, in 1867, the Catholic Church ordered him the construction of the Church of Saint Stephen in Constantinople. From there, the Ottoman government sent him to Thessaloniki, where he built some of the most important public edifices of the city, in 1888 he was married and established his residence there. The foreign missions and representatives, such as merchants of the city, assigned him also the creation of various communal. Many of his descendants live in the city. Mark Mazower, Θεσσαλονίκη, Πόλη των Φαντασμάτων, εκδόσεις Αλεξάνδρια,2006, ISBN 960-221-354-X
5.
History of the Jews in Thessaloniki
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The history of the Jews of Thessaloniki, reaches back two thousand years. The city of Thessaloniki housed a major Jewish community, mostly Eastern Sephardim and it is the only known example of a city of this size in the Jewish diaspora that retained a Jewish majority for centuries. Sephardic Jews immigrated to the city following their expulsion from Spain by Christian rulers under the Alhambra Decree in 1492 and this community influenced the Sephardic world both culturally and economically, and the city was nicknamed la madre de Israel. The community experienced a golden age in the 16th century, when they developed a culture in the city. Like other groups in the Ottoman Empire, they continued to practice traditional culture during the time when western Europe was undergoing industrialization, after Greece achieved independence from the Ottoman Empire, it made Jews full citizens of the country in the 1920s. During World War II, the Germans occupied Greece in 1941, in 1943 they forced the Jews in Thessaloniki into a ghetto near the rail lines, and started deporting them to concentration camps and labor camps, where most of the 60,000 deported died. This resulted in the near-extermination of the community, only 1200 Jews live in the city today. Paul of Tarsus First Epistle to the Thessalonians mentions Hellenized Jews in the city about 52 CE, in the upper part of the city, there is the suburb of Agios Pavlos, where it is believed Paul taught during his visit to the local Jews. However, researchers have not determined yet where the first Jews lived in the city, in 1170, Benjamin of Tudela reported that there were 500 Jews in Thessaloniki. In the following centuries, the native Romaniote community was joined by some Italian, a small Jewish population lived here during the Byzantine period, but it left virtually no trace in documents or archeological artifacts. In 1430, the start of Ottoman domination, the Jewish population was still small, the Ottomans used population transfers within the empire following military conquests to achieve goals of border security or repopulation, they called it Sürgün. Following the fall of Constantinople in 1453, an example of sürgün was the Ottomans forcing Jews from the Balkans and Anatolia to relocate there, at the time, few Jews were left in Salonika, none were recorded in the Ottoman census of 1478. In 1492, the joint Catholic Monarchs of Spain Isabella I and Ferdinand II, many immigrated to Salonica, sometimes after a stop in Portugal or Italy. The Ottoman Empire granted protection to Jews as dhimmis and encouraged the newcomers to settle in its territories, according to the historians Rosamond McKitterick and Christopher Allmand, the Empires invitation to the expelled Jews was a demographic strategy to prevent ethnic Greeks from dominating the city. The first Sephardim came in 1492 from Majorca and they were repentant returnees to Judaism after earlier forced conversion to Catholicism. In 1493, Castilians and Sicilians joined them, in subsequent years, other Jews came from those lands and also from Aragon, Naples, Venice and Provence. Later, in 1540 and 1560, Jews from Portugal sought refuge in Salonika in response to the persecution of the marranos. In addition to these Sephardim, a few Ashkenazim arrived from Austria, Transylvania and they were sometimes forcibly relocated under the Ottoman policy of sürgün, following the conquest of land by Suleiman the Magnificent beginning in 1526
6.
Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki
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The Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki is a museum in Thessaloniki, Central Macedonia, Greece. It holds and interprets artifacts from the Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic and Roman periods, mostly from the city of Thessaloniki, the museum is housed in a building designed by architect Patroklos Karantinos and is an example of the modern architectural trends of Greece. Built in 1962, the museum had a new wing added to it in 1980, in which the findings from Vergina were displayed, in 2001 and 2004, in the run-up to the 2004 Athens Olympics, the museum was extensively renovated and its permanent exhibits reorganized. The central rooms hold exhibits from the excavations conducted in Thessaloniki. At present, the collection of Archaic to Late Roman sculptures from Thessaloniki and they illustrate the history of Thessaloniki from prehistoric times to Late Antiquity. Apart from its permanent displays, the Archaeological Museum also hosts major temporary, a showcase in the lobby of the museum displays some finds from the excavation of the Neolithic settlement at Makrygialos in Pieria, accompanied by information about the progress of the excavation. In the new wing, the The Gold of Macedon exhibition includes finds from excavations in Central Macedonia. There are also finds from cemeteries, and their role in burial customs is described. The Thessaloniki in Prehistory exhibition aims to recreate a picture of the Thermaic Gulf littoral before the city of Thessaloniki was built. On 26 February 2010, Greek authorities arrested two men found in possession of various antiquities, including a bronze statue of Alexander. If confirmed, this would make it the first original work of Lysippos ever discovered, the statue is currently being examined at the laboratory of the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki, which is expected to confirm or deny its authenticity
7.
Museum of Plaster Casts (Thessaloniki)
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The Museum of Plaster Casts occupies two rooms in the basement of the new building of the School of Philosophy of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, in Central Macedonia, Greece. The museum houses a collection of casts, replicas and original archaeological artifacts. The collection dates from the time of the Universitys founding and is due to K. Romaio, the collection of plaster casts of marble and clay originals and replicas of works of art in metal is the finest in Greece. It brings Archaeological Department students into contact with the ancient Greek and Roman art of production, as well as ceramics. Room A holds replicas of works from archaic and classical times, room B exhibits works from Hellenistic and Roman times
8.
Hagios Demetrios
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It is part of the site Palaeochristian and Byzantine Monuments of Thessaloniki on the list of World Heritage Sites by UNESCO since 1988. The first church on the spot was constructed in the early 4th century AD, a century later, a prefect named Leontios replaced the small oratory with a larger, three-aisled basilica. Repeatedly gutted by fires, the church eventually was reconstructed as a basilica in 629–634. This was the form of the church much as it is today. The most important shrine in the city, it was larger than the local cathedral. The historic location of the latter is now unknown, the church had an unusual shrine called the ciborium, a hexagonal, roofed structure at one side of the nave. It was made of or covered with silver, the structure had doors and inside was a couch or bed. Unusually, it did not hold any physical relics of the saint, the ciborium seems to have been a symbolic tomb. It was rebuilt at least once, the basilica is famous for six extant mosaic panels, dated to the period between the latest reconstruction and the inauguration of the Iconoclastic policies in 730. These mosaics, depicting St. Demetrius with officials responsible for the restoration and with children, an inscription below one of the images glorifies heaven for saving the people of Saloniki from a pagan Slavic raid in 612. It also destroyed the roof and upper walls of the church, black-and-white photographs and good watercolour versions give an idea of the early Byzantine craftsmanship lost during the fire. Following the Great Fire of 1917, it took decades to restore the church, archeological excavations conducted in the 1930s and 1940s revealed interesting artifacts that may be seen in a museum situated inside the churchs crypt. The excavations also uncovered the ruins of a Roman bath, where St. Demetrius was said to have been held prisoner, a Roman well was also discovered. Scholars believe this is where soldiers dropped the body of St. Demetrius after his execution, after restoration, the church was reconsecrated in 1949. Underneath the Church of St Demetrios is the place where St Demetrios, as the level of the ground gradually rose over the centuries, this area acquired the form of a crypt. According both to tradition and to archaeological findings, it was an old bathhouse, in which Demetrios was imprisoned and eventually martyred in 303 AD. In the 5th century, when the first Church of St Demetrios was built, the site of his martyrdom was incorporated into the church and the fountain was converted into a source of holy water. In the years followed, the fountain acquired basins, from which the faithful could collect myron
