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In order to function properly, a museum needs well organised storerooms and well functioning workshops. The Museum of Byzantine Culture has some 5,000 square metres of storerooms and workshops, almost twice the area of its exhibition spaces.
Conservation workshops
There are seven different workshops, each specialising in the conservation of one kind of archaeological material or of materials with similar conservation requirements: wood and icons; pottery and glass; metal objects; paper and parchment; mosaic; wall paintings; and stone and marble. The museum also has a temporary holding room, where the archaeological material undergoes an initial cleaning before proceeding to the specialised workshops.
The treatment the objects receive during the conservation process not only protects them from the further ravages of time, but also restores them as closely as possible to their original form, so that specialists can then study them, extract useful information and draw conclusions about the objects themselves and the age which produced them, and, if they deem it advisable, include them in the museum's displays.
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Cleaning the paint film on an icon is considered to be one of the most delicate and difficult processes. The aim is the gradual, controlled removal of deposits and oxidised varnish ¯which affect the colours and the appearance of the work¯ in such a way as to safeguard the integrity of the painting and achieve a uniform and satisfactory degree of cleaning, while still respecting the natural patina of time.
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Coins and small metal objects, such as items of jewellery, are cleaned under the microscope, using scalpel, needle, and other fine instruments. An ultrasound scraper
with compressed air may also be used.
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The fragments of a vessel are re-assembled to restore the shape as fully as possible. It is often desirable or even necessary to reconstruct missing parts, not only for the vessel's structural integrity and strength, but for aesthetic reasons too, and also to give the observer a better idea of the vessel's original shape.
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Archaeological storerooms
The museum's storerooms have received considerable attention and are designed so that various kinds of archaeological finds can be stored in conditions that meet international specifications (appropriate levels of humidity, temperature and lighting, the use of materials that are compatible with the objects).
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The archaeological storerooms of the Museum of Byzantine Culture have adopted solutions used for industrial storage, such as storing sculptures on shelves on pallets that can be moved by forklift trucks and suspending icons and mosaics on vertical sliding frames.
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A more unconventional mode of storage, which recalls their original use as containers for transportation, has been adopted for amphoras. They are stacked one on top of another inside a replica of the hull of a Byzantine ship, exactly as they would have been stacked in the hold of a commercial ship in antiquity. The ship was constructed on the basis of data gleaned from the study of shipwrecks, especially the one located at Yassi Ada off the Asia Minor coast.
The undertaking was made possible by the generous sponsorship of the Papastratos Company.
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