Marble Museum

At Tower of Of Tinos it is located Marble Museum, one of 9 Theme Museums founded by Piraeus Group Cultural Foundation (PIOP) and which welcome more than one hundred thousand visitors each year, highlighting the country's cultural heritage with an emphasis on craft and industrial technology.

The Tower, the most important center of marble art in Greece, is itself a work of art. Walking in the picturesque alleys of the village you will find many samples of marble art with a trademark of the marble lintels (skylights) in the houses of the inhabitants, which are decorated with intricate patterns.

The Museum of Panormite Artists hosts a collection of sculptures by famous artists of the island, in the cemetery of the village you will find the unique sculptures of the most important sculptor of modern Greece from the Tower, Giannoulis Halepas, while here is the marble sculpture department of the School of Fine Arts.

The Museum of Marble, in the Tower of Tinos (member of the network of museums, silk in Soufli, silversmithing in Ioannina, hydro-propulsion in Dimitsana, environment of Stymfalia, mastic in Chios, museum of Olive and Greek oil in Sparta, museum of industrial oil in Lesvos, brick and tile factory in Tsalo) example of the presentation of the technology of marble, a material that holds a special place in the architecture and art of Greece, from antiquity until today.

The permanent exhibition, which describes in detail and vividly the grid of tool equipment and marble techniques, emphasizes the pre-industrial and proto-industrial Tinos, the most important modern Greek marble center. At the same time, it highlights the social and economic context in which local laboratories were developed.

At permanent exposure of the Museum of Marble Tinos you will see up close a remarkable number of authentic objects, such as:

• Secular, ecclesiastical, tomb and everyday use works in marble (lintels, fountains, coats of arms, burials, shrines, mortars, etc.)
• Clay molds and plaster copies
• Quarrying and marble tools
• Mechanical equipment
• Archive material
• Designs of old marble sculptures (the richest collection in Greece)

The Exhibits are framed by interconnected representations of a quarry, a marble workshop and the assembly-placement of a despotic throne. The audiovisual material of the exhibition brings to life the traditional working methods of the quarry and the marble artist.

In the open spaces of the Museum of Marble, together with completed and semi-finished marble works, historical mechanical equipment is exhibited, which refers to characteristic images of natural workplaces.

Ο equipment that was saved and preserved in the Museum of Marble includes:

Marble lifting machine (biga), wagon for transporting volumes (from the quarry of Vathi) and basovagonet (scoop), turning and rails (from the quarry of Patela).

Visitors to the Marble Museum have the opportunity to see volumes of marble in their natural state, to feel their texture, to observe with a magnifying glass the color and the crystals.

Watching them award-winning educational films of the museum, with the participation of old Tinian craftsmen, will know in a live way the route from the raw material to the completed work and will see scenes from the extraction of the marble, the first processing and transport and finally the shaping, decoration and placement of marble structures .

The Marble Museum is a museum that no visitor of the island of Panagia should miss!