The Cultural Center of Athens is housed in a neo-classical building in Academias Street, just "behind" the National and Capodistrian University of Athens building, shown in another page of this Album. An impressive edifice, it was built in 1835 on plans of the Danish architect Ch. Hansen. It was first used as a Community Hospital in 1842, and served the inhabitants of Athens in this way for 13 decades. In 1971 the building and the surrounding gardens received a major preservation intervention; many additional buildings were removed, the area was landscaped into a nice garden and in the preserved original building the Cultural Center of the City of Athens was housed.

Right next to it, the "Palamas Building" (also known as the "Pink Building") lies adjacent to the "Cultural Center" in such a way that the two edifices form an architectural unit, and few people can distinguish between its parts. In this second building the Theater Museum is to be found. Because the two buildings, both esthetically and photographically, form one unit, we present them in one page of this Album.

The Theater Museum was founded in 1938 by the “Greek Playwrights’ Society” under the Presidency of the author Theodoros Synadinos. Yannis Sideris, the great historian of the Greek Theater, was the first Director of the Museum, dedicating his life and work to the meticulous gathering and organizing of a rich selection of theatrical exhibitions and archives, concerning the whole and interesting history of the Hellenic Theater. In a few years, the Theater Museum succeeded in becoming and being recognized as a very dynamic and profound “Hellenic Center of Theatrical Research”, possessing a monumental and unique archive of manuscripts and books (dating to the 18th century), theater programs (since 1880), photographs, negatives, slides, posters, newspaper articles, interviews or theater critiques, films’ archives, audiovisual material (around 2.000 videos of winter and summer theatrical performances of Greek or foreign plays, since 1984, taped exclusively and under the absolute responsibility of the Museum), disks and audiotapes of some of the most famous radio theatrical pieces, operas, theater or film music etc. Today, the “Hellenic Center of Theatrical Research – Theater Museum” is the only one so completed and thorough all over Europe. Hundreds of pupils and student of all school levels and from allover Greece visit every day the Theater Museum which also collaborates with many other education programs. The Theater Museum possesses since 1991 a quite developed computing system, both at the Research Center and the Library, in order to be able and prepared to help and provide access as fast as possible, to all the necessary information needed. It will soon become a very important and completed source that will forward theatrical research, cultivation and education. (Source: www.theatremuseum.gr)

(Photos by Michael Tziotis)