From the early years of the establishment of the Greek state, the numerous and important finds from the widespread ruins of Delos and the extensive necropolis of Rheneia created the need for a museum to be created on Mykonos, for the collection and protection of the numerous antiquities from the neighbouring islands. With the help of the Demogerontia (the Council of Elders) and the Municipality of Mykonos initially, and later with that of the Archaeological Service, private houses were rented to house the funerary stelae, inscriptions and statues.
In 1897, the first Superintendent of Antiquities of Delos/Mykonos, Dimitrios Stavropoullos, while supervising the excavations of the French School at Athens on Delos, began excavations at Rheneia. There he located the Pit of Purification, the place where the Athenians, in the winter of 426/425 BC, deposited the bones and offerings from the tombs of the Delians. These had been removed from the Sacred Island in accordance with an oracle (Thucydides 3.104). Rheneia would now become the burial place for the Delians – as births and deaths were henceforth prohibited on the sacred island – until Roman times.
The thousands of finds from the Pit of Purification and more generally from the Rheneia necropolis made the creation of a proper Museum in Mykonos more necessary than ever. Thus, on May 9, 1898, the Municipality of Mykonos granted the Ministry of Ecclesiastical and Public Education a field that it had purchased a few months earlier at the Kaminaki location for the creation of a Public Archaeological Museum.
Construction of the Archaeological Museum of Mykonos began in 1899, thus making it one of the oldest museums in Greek territory. It houses both the antiquities that were kept in houses in Mykonos and the antiquities from the excavations of the Archaeological Service in Rheneia.
In the late 1960s, with the active assistance of the Ephor Nikolaos Zapheiropoulos, the Archaeological Museum of Mykonos was expanded, and the exhibition of antiquities from Rheneia was reorganized. The antiquities found on Mykonos itself were of necessity placed – due to lack of space – in the Museum’s warehouses, except for a few finds from the famous prehistoric sites of the island (namely Ftelia, Diakoftis and Angelika), as well as the famous Pithos of Mykonos.
The Archaeological Museum of Mykonos has hosted a series of temporary exhibitions in recent years, on subjects ranging from archaeology to contemporary art, amongst others. The desire was to make it a key resource in highlighting the rich cultural heritage of the island. At the same time, the Ephorate of Antiquities of the Cyclades, in collaboration with the Municipality of Mykonos, has initiated the further expansion and re-exhibition of the Museum. In this way the finds from Mykonos itself will be displayed in their entirety for the first time, alongside the ones from Rheneia.
Bibliography Hatzidakis, P. I., The Archaeological Museum of Mykonos, The Mentor, 35, 1995, pp. 108–122.
Caskey, M. Ervin, Notes on Relief Pithoi of the Tenian-Boiotian Group, American Journal of Archaeology (AJA), 80 (1), 1976, pp. 19–41.
Ervin, M., A Relief Pithos from Mykonos, Archaiologikon Deltion, 18 (1963) [1960, Meletai A’], pp. 37–75
