The Hellenic Library of the Onassis Foundation
The main area of the library
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| Established | 2010 |
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| Location | Athens |
| Branches | 56 (Amalias Avenue Athens, Greece) |
| Collection | |
| Items collected | books, journals, magazines, and manuscripts from 15th to 19th century. |
| Criteria for collection | The Library accumulates books representing the intellectual activity of the Greeks, whether of the secular world or of the Church, from the period of the Italian Renaissance until the late years of Neo-Hellenic Enlightenment. |
The Hellenic Library of the Onassis Foundation is a library that includes part of the Konstantinos Sp. Staikos' book collection. It is housed in the neoclassical building at 56 Amalias Avenue Plaka, Athens, Greece. The library that was acquired by the Onassis Foundation.
The genesis of the formation regarding the collection dates 1970s. From the early 1980s, the library had become a fundamental tool for my systematic search for every printed book able to cast light on the printing and publishing course taken by Greeks from the years of the Italian Renaissance onward, without any geographic differentiation.
From 1986 the most representative body of its collection, covering the works and the days of Greek scholars and printers active in the period of the Italian Renaissance (late fourteenth - mid-sixteenth centuries) became the object of exhibitions for the promotion of their work. First editions by Manuel Chrysoloras, George of Trebizond, Cardinal Bessarion, Theodoros Gazis, Zacharias Kallierges, Nikolaos Vlastos and numerous others were presented successively in Florence (1986); the Benaki Museum (1987); Geneva University (1988); Strasburg (1989) and elsewhere. These exhibitions were accompanied by detailed bilingual Catalogues, compiled in collaboration with M.I. Manoussakas, with introductory Notes and extensive commentaries for each book. The ultimate goal of these exhibitions was the promotion of the inestimable and decisive contribution of the Greek scholars of the period to the diffusion of Greek letters and to demonstrate: the relations they cultivated with the supreme Humanists of Italy, many of whom had been their pupils.
Subsequently, more representative material, according to circumstance, of the whole collection was brought out in historic libraries and foundations of countries such as Italy, at the Venice Institute for Byzantine and Late-Byzantine Studies in 1993, with landmark editions by Aldus Manutius, the products of literary editors by renowned Greek scholars such as Markos Mousouros and Ioannes Gregoropoulos. In 1995, in Austria, at Vienna’s Imperial Library, nearly all the Greek books published/printed there (1749-1800) were exhibited, which were the most significant examples of the Neohellenic Enlightenment. In celebration of the Five Hundred Years since the establishment of the first Greek printing press (Venice 1499), the Greek Parliament Foundation assigned to Triantafyllos Sklavenitis and Konstantinos Staikos the organization of an exhibition of the most important material of the whole period.
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