Portugal Colonial - Greece to open museum of ancient undersea treasures

The EU-funded museum -- the largest cultural project currently underway in Greece -- has a budget of more than 93 million euros ($97 million).

Culture Minister Lina Mendoni said the new 26-square-metre (6.8-square-metre) building would display "thousands of finds emerging for years from the depths of the Greek seas", without giving further details.

Besides archaeology, the museum at the country's largest port will also highlight Greece's rich shipping history, she said.

"Our country needed such a museum for decades," Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis said while on a visit to the site on Monday.

The museum, expected to open in the summer of 2026, will occupy part of the Piraeus docks, incorporating some existing elements from a 1930s storage silo.

According to the culture ministry, it will display more than 2,500 antiquities including many now in storage in Pylos, Rhodes and Paros.

In antiquity Piraeus was the principal port of ancient Athens, from which its distinctive trireme ships would sail across the Mediterranean Sea.

The city's small archaeological museum currently has a bronze naval ram and marble eye from a 4th-century trireme on display.

V.Fontes--PC