We all have our favourite museums. If not a favourite museum, then a favourite wing of a museum. It might even be a display case, or a single object that makes our heart stop with its beauty or intricacy, its fragile, impossible antiquity.
The Byzantine Museum of Thessaloniki, Greece (or Museum of Byzantine Culture) has many of the hall marks of the museums I love. It includes a good coffee shop, some wonderful icons and charming signage.
The best museums have mosaics
And of course it has mosaics.. Its mosaics are particularly significant for me because it was these mosaics which I first really looked at. I went to visit them after my epiphany on a Pelion beach when I realised that mosaics were what I wanted to make and do and think and be.
Among other things, The Byzantine Museum of Thessaloniki includes 4th century patterned stone mosaics from private houses and a 5th century work incorporating the months of the year. There are also glass and gold fragments of dedicatory church churches from the 7th – 9th centuries.
Taking the mosaic tour
Let’s start at the beginning with these sixth century mosaics (below) which greet you in the first room of the museum. According to the label, they are from a basilica north of the Church of the Taxiarchs in Thessaloniki.
They are remarkably secular for Christian mosaics and the designs are surely borrowed from Roman vernacular floors. I love mosaics which have a made feel to them. Of course all mosaics are made. But it’s the ones which show their making, the hands that have pressed the tesserae into the soft mortar that I have a special weakness for.
In the same room you see the Byzantine church mosaics from the Church of St. Dimtrios. 
Continue on your journey and consider that these mosaics were being made as the Roman empire was collapsing. They were laid during a two-hundred year span as one empire fell and another, the new Byzantine empire centred in Constantinople, was rising. The next room you come across is largely dedicated to one vast floor mosaic from a fifth century reception room.
Nearby is a strip of mosaics from a Thessaloniki house floor dating from the fourth century:
wall paintings/mosaic inspiration
In order not to appear blind to everything in the world except mosaics, here are some early Christian tomb paintings. As it happens, they would make wonderful mosaic designs. Again, they have that utterly beguiling spontaneity. You can see the brush stokes, and feel the painter standing back and thinking: ‘Hmmm, we need a bit more grass here, an extra squiggle there.’
calender mosaic
Finally, there is another room which contains part of another large floor mosaic. It illustrates the months of the year depicted as portraits – a common theme in ancient mosaics. This one was also once a reception room in a 5th century Thessaloniki house:
With so much to offer mosaic-wise, the Byzantine Museum of Thessaloniki should have a firm place on my list of Top Favourite Museums. It is no fault of its own that it doesn’t. It is just a tad too orderly and organised for my liking. I tend to be a chaotic, jumbled museum sort of person. I am a devotee of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford and the ultimate disordered delight of the Cairo Museum in Egypt.
For me, the best museums are the ones which you can never really see no matter how many times you visit. I still relish the moment I stumbled across an El Amarna sandstone lavatory seat in a dusty corridor of the Egyptian museum.
And for an extra ten marks, can anyone identify this creature chasing the bull – a lion gone badly awry perhaps? Or an oversized, over optimistic lamb?
