The National Documentation Centre of Greece (NDC) recently announced the creation of two new repositories for two organisations based in Thessaloniki: the Macedonian Art Society TECHNI and the Historical Archive of Greek Refugees, both of which have been for years active in the documentation and promotion of the city’s cultural and historical heritage. The National Documentation Centre is an institution that collects and saves digital data produced by the Greek scientific, research and cultural communities, making it available to the public, especially those interested in study, research and business. Its repositories are a result of the SaaS (Software as a Service) options it provides to various regional institutions.
Macedonian Art Society TECHNI
TECHNI is an art society founded in Thessaloniki in 1951, with the goal of bringing together local intellectuals and artists in order to promote the city’s cultural life. Its fields of activity include music, theatre, visual arts, dance, literature and architecture. It paved the way for the establishment of historical institutions like the Thessaloniki International Film Festival and the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Aristotle University. Its archives feature valuable pieces of art as well as documents from important figures of Greece’s recent cultural history, such as renowned archaeologist Manolis Andronikos.
NDC’s repository for the Macedonian Art Society TECHNI provides access to its permanent collections, which include paintings, sketches, publications and other material. It can be browsed by title, creator, date, subject or key-words. Findings are also sorted by categories, like “Art” or “Cinema”. The archives are constantly updated, with the addition of further documents from TECHNI archives for arts, architecture and literature.
Historical Archive of Greek Refugees
The Historical Archive of Greek Refugees (HAGR, link in Greek here) was founded in 1994 as a public institution managed by the Municipality of Kalamaria, Thessaloniki. Its mission is to safeguard the memory and historical identity of Greek refugees, particularly those arriving from Asia Minor due to the Greco-Turkish War (1919-1922) and the subsequent population exchange between Greece and Turkey. It also covers the history of Greek populations in several parts of the former Ottoman Empire and the USSR, as well as Greek migrants who travelled to other European countries, Australia and the USA in search of employment, during the 20th century.
The HAGR repository created by NDC contains digitalised recordings of oral testaments by first generation refugees, as well as archives, written accounts and photographic material coming from both public records and private collections, documenting the lives of Greek refugees and expatriates both in their places of origin as well as their new home . 4,805 documents have been incorporated so far, and additional data is constantly added.
National Documentation Centre
The National Documentation Centre, a public institution founded as part of the National Hellenic Research Foundation, one of the largest Research Centres in Greece, and it operates under the supervision of the General Secretariat of Research and Technology of the Ministry of Education and Religion. NDC’s mission is to safeguard Greek cultural and scientific legacy and make this information available to the public by gathering, certifying, organising, preserving and providing access to digital content of high quality. Its repositories form part of its SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions, while it also provides services such as production of official statistics and other internationally established indicators.
On the occasion of these two last additions to the archives managed by the NDC, the institution also announced the development of three more repositories containing documents and art collections, still in progress; this will be the result of its collaboration with the Faculty of Fine Arts at the Aristotle University and the Teloglion Fine Arts Foundation, also in Thessaloniki – bringing the number of NDC’s partners in the city up to 50.
Read more on the National Documentation Centre via Greek News Agenda: Evi Sachini on the National Documentation Centre and RDI in Greece
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