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Thessaloniki Cinema Museum

Summary: The only Greek institution — public or private — that presents the history of cinema under a national rubric in dedicated exhibition space. Located on the ground floor of a former Customs Office building on the Thessaloniki waterfront. Inaugurated in its current configuration in 1997, the year Thessaloniki was European Capital of Culture; an architectural redesign was commissioned in 2020–2022, demolishing the original "eight sequences" exhibition in favor of an interactive database. Central case of chapter-2-center-periphery.

Sources: cinema-of-marbles-draft-2025-12-30.md, sections 2.1.0 through 2.2.2 (lines 1052–2037), including a personal interview with curator Nasia Chourmouziadi (9 November 2016) and with architect Korina Filoxenidi (30 August 2023).

Last updated: 2026-05-24.

Site

The building was designed by the Levantine architect Alexandre Vallaury and built by the Jewish architect Eli Modiano in 1910, commissioned by the Ottoman state to the Société Anonyme Ottomane de Construction et Exploitation du Port de Salonique. The museum was relocated to this site as part of Thessaloniki's 1997 European Capital of Culture programme, justified by the building's "industrial heritage" status as a port-infrastructure relic of late-Ottoman and early-Greek-state modernization.

The site is read by Mademli as a layered stratification of histories — Ottoman, Jewish, French, Greek-national, European — that the museum cannot avoid having to mediate.

The 1997 exhibition: eight sequences

The original (and now demolished) permanent exhibition was organized into eight "sequences" — a deliberate translation of cinema montage into peripatetic space. Curator Nasia Chourmouziadi (interviewed by the author on 9 November 2016) is quoted: "Cinema cannot be considered as a product of artistic or professional activity that can be collected, classified, and evaluated. The decisive moment of cinema is the moment of its performance and perception by the audience."

The exhibit deliberately refused to draw "the borders of Greek cinema." Visitors moved through sixteen projectors, eight model cameras, props, costumes, stills, cinephile paraphernalia, ten interactive screens, and a four-seat cinema hall at the end.

Signature exhibits

  • Zeiss Ikon Ernemann IV 95802 — a bulky German projector left on the doorstep, read as a "silent monument" in the Foucauldian sense.
  • "Athina" projector by Ioannis Pissanos's company — the first device branded as exclusively "Greek" film technology, with a Pissanos logo combining the head of Athena and a Maltese cross.
  • Wallpaper still of the manakia-brothers' The Weavers, with a real metal film-reel spool that visitors can touch.
  • A non-functional replica of the Manakia brothers' Bioscope 300 camera, framed by the story of the Budapest restoration trip.
  • A video installation built on the (false) line "I was born in 1896, the same year a train was reaching Lyon station in Paris," credited to Yannakis Manakia's son.

The 2022 redesign

In early 2022, funded under the EU's NRRP "Greece 2.0" Recovery and Resilience plan, the museum became the first major Greek cultural institution to pursue digital transformation in its main exhibition. The k&k architects' study (Katerina Kotzia, Korina Filoxenidou, Thodoris Halvatzoglou; preliminary December 2020, final March 2022) proposes:

  • Demolition of the eight sequences.
  • A modular open ground-floor space.
  • One central interactive Database installation — a video-wall organized around a horizontal timeline shaped like a film strip, with stills expanding to either side as a viewser selects keywords from a tag-cloud of roughly fifty preset terms.
  • An atrium with interspersed amphitheaters.
  • All operational functions (box office, cloakroom, staff, museum shop) confined to a "box" — read by Mademli as a Cartesian "ghost in the machine."

Cinema as event vs cinema as data

The chapter argues that the redesign represents a shift from cinema-as-event (Chourmouziadi's 1997 emphasis on screening as the decisive moment) to cinema-as-database (Manovich's "symbolic form" of the computer age). Both are forms of archival fixing — the dissertation refuses to read the redesign as emancipation.

Connection to the Thessaloniki International Film Festival

The museum operates under the same institutional umbrella as the Thessaloniki International Film Festival (whose 1992 internationalization coincided with the Macedonia naming dispute and whose logos have used the Macedonian Sun and, later, a diaphragm-Sun composite). The new exhibition design proposes regular synchronization with the Festival's annual programming.