A major effort to digitize the historic archives of the Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice is underway, opening centuries of Greek historical material to wider public access through a new digital repository and online platform.
The project was presented on March 9 during a public event at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where scholars outlined plans to digitize and document the Institute’s collections. The initiative is funded through Greece’s Digital Transformation Programme 2021–2027 and implemented in collaboration with the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki.
The collections being digitized include manuscripts, archival records, early printed books, images, and museum objects spanning several centuries. Many of the documents date from the late 15th century through the mid-20th century and record the life of the Greek community in Venice during a period when the city served as one of the most important bridges between the Greek world and Western Europe.
For centuries, Venice was home to Greek merchants, scholars, clergy, and printers. Together they formed one of the most important Greek communities outside the Ottoman world, leaving behind an extensive historical record that today forms the core of the Institute’s collections. Their story is explored in the Cosmos Philly column Venice: Modern Greece’s First Diaspora.
The Hellenic Institute of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Studies in Venice manages that heritage. Established in the mid-20th century as a public institution of the Greek state, it is the only Greek research center operating outside Greece dedicated to Byzantine and post-Byzantine studies. The Institute oversees archives, museum collections, and historic sites connected with the Greek community of Venice, including the Orthodox church of San Giorgio dei Greci, one of the most important monuments of Greek Orthodoxy in Western Europe.
The new digital platform will bring much of this material together through a multilingual portal that will allow users to explore digitized documents, archival collections, and educational resources online.
For historians of the Greek diaspora, the archives preserved in Venice are among the most important outside Greece itself. Expanding digital access to these materials will allow researchers, students, and readers worldwide to engage with sources that until now required a visit to Venice.