This is the only museum in Europe entirely devoted to Byzantine art. On the ground floor, for the presentation of religious sculptures, the rooms have been arranged to suggest churches. The 1^st room evokes a small early Christian basilica; the 2^nd contains the Byzantine sculptures proper (bas-reliefs from the 9 to the 13C); the 3^rd reproduces a small church with cupolas, in the form of a Greek cross, and the 4^th reconstitutes a church from the Turkish occupation.

This Doric temple was built in the epoch of Pericles by Iktinos, under Phidias. His statue, dedicated to Athena, decorated the sanctuary. In the Byzantine epoch this statue taken to Constantinople, was destroyed during the siege of the city by the Crusaders; the temple was then converted into a church. Later it became a cathedral, then a mosque, and it preserved most of its sculptures until an explosion of the gunpowder store in 1687 destroyed many of them. Major restoration from 1834.

The museum illustrates social history and daily life in Athens during King Othon's reign. On the upper floor, the reconstituted palace rooms include paintings in the Kasma Stathi collection. Beyond Klafthmonos, the horse-riding statue of Kolokotronis, a hero of the war of independence, Kolokotroni Square stands before the old parliament built from 1858 to 1871 by F. Boulanger and abandoned in 1935: the meeting room has been preserved and the outbuildings house the National History Museum.

Admire the famous Angels' Concert by Greco, post-Byzantine Cretan icons (notably from the 17C), neo-Hellenic painting from its origins, Heptanesian paintings (from the Ionian Islands) of the 18C and canvases from the 19C representative of the Munich school. Prominently displayed are the painter Parthenis, whose influence is decisive in the development of 20C Greek painting, the naïf painter Theophilos, and the great sculptor Halepas.