Museum of Cycladic Art

The Museum of Cycladic Art in Athens holds one of the world's most significant collections of ancient Cycladic figurines, the spare, abstract marble sculptures produced across the Aegean islands between roughly 3200 and 2000 BC. The museum's permanent collection traces the development of Cycladic civilisation alongside ancient Greek and Cypriot antiquities, offering a concentrated encounter with some of the oldest human figures ever carved. The building on Neofytou Douka Street in Kolonaki occupies a neoclassical mansion connected to a purpose-built modern wing, a pairing that reflects the collection's dialogue between antiquity and contemporary appreciation.

The museum was founded through the private collection of Nikolaos and Dolly Goulandris, and opened to the public in 1986. It remains a privately run institution with a scholarly reputation that extends well beyond Greece. Visitors arriving with a skip-the-line ticket can move directly into the galleries, spending more time with the figurines whose influence on twentieth-century sculptors, including Brancusi and Modigliani, has been widely documented.