Silk Museum, Soufli

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Silk Museum, Soufli

Museum — Soufli, ~65km north of the city

Opened in 1990 inside the Kourtidis Mansion, built in 1883 by a wealthy silk merchant, the Silk Museum is part of the Piraeus Bank Group Cultural Foundation's national network of heritage museums — the same foundation behind similar industrial-history museums elsewhere in Greece.

The permanent exhibition covers the pre-industrial methods of Soufli's sericulture, including the stages of silkworm rearing from seed cocoon to the finished thread. Soufli's streets still carry the physical trace of that industry: tall koukoulospita, houses built with upper floors specifically to raise silkworms, line the old town alongside the merchant mansions their owners built with the proceeds.

A quieter, more curatorial counterpart to the family-run Art of Silk Museum nearby — worth doing both if silk history interests you, since one comes from a heritage foundation's archive and the other from a mill still in business.

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