The National Archive of Monuments

In 2021 the ‘Archaeological Cadastre’ project was awarded in the ‘Education and Culture’ category of the Digital Governance Awards 2020-2021.

The Archaeological Cadastre MIS is where the archaeological, administrative and geospatial recording and documentation of immovable monuments, archaeological and historical sites and their protection zones are carried out. The aim of the project is the complete oversight, protection and management of monuments and the cultural environment by all the Services involved.

The respective Portal enables interested citizens, professionals and public bodies to be informed about Greece’s monumental wealth, as well as any commitments and restrictions under the current legislation in areas or properties of interest to them.

At present, the Archaeological Cadastre Portal contains descriptive and geospatial data for more than 17,000 immovable monuments, 3,520 archaeological and historical sites, 844 protection zones and 220 museums.

OPS User Guide (in greek)

Web Portal User Guide (in greek)

To date, approximately 710,000 mobile monuments from museums and archaeological warehouses of the Regional and Special Regional Services of the Directorate-General of Antiquities and Cultural Heritage have been recorded in the Management Information System (MIS) of the Digital Collections.

Similarly, the Portal provides access to approximately 68,000 items from the prehistoric to the modern era, with multiple search, browsing and personalised organization functionalities.

The Terminology Thesauruses of the National Archive of Monuments were developed by a large group of experts in the framework of the project ‘Enrichment of the Digital Collections of Mobile Monuments of the Ministry of Culture and Sports, and Development of a New Information System of the National Archive of Monuments’, pursuant to the provisions of Article 20(3)(aa) of the Organisation of the Ministry of Culture (Presidential Decree 4, Government Gazette, Series I, Issue 7/22-01-2018) for the codification of scientific terminology. These are structured, relational, multi-level thesauruses of terms with a tree structure or value lists covering every field of systematisation of information concerning mobile monuments, with a time horizon from Early Prehistory to the modern era.

Terminology thesauruses have been developed on the basis of international standards and fully operational for general categories of monuments such as type, material, decoration, use, creator, as well as specific categories, such as inscriptions, coinage, documents and manuscripts. All thesauruses, which have been translated into English, are dynamic sets that are constantly enriched by MIS users themselves, who can submit recommendations to the system administrators. It is therefore a unique, internationally original, constantly enriched tool; however, it is currently used and enriched exclusively by the scientific staff of the Ministry’s services.

Training of stakeholders in use of the system is systematically provided by Directorate employees.

The archival material kept at the premises of the Archive consists of about 12,000 archival files, mainly from the administrative correspondence of the Central Services.

The bulk of the material concerns cases related to the discovery, storage and protection of mobile monuments and studies highlighting archaeological sites of monuments, while artifacts concerning the combating of antiquities smuggling are equally important.