Zakynthos Byzantine Museum

The Byzantine Museum of Zakynthos is located on Solomos Square in the center of Zakynthos Town on the east coast of Zakynthos in the Ionian Islands of Greece, and holds what is considered the most important collection of post-Byzantine religious art in the Ionian Islands. The museum was established in direct response to the catastrophic earthquake of August 12, 1953, which destroyed the majority of the island's churches, monasteries, and civic buildings. In the immediate aftermath, teams of archaeologists, art historians, and volunteers worked to salvage portable religious objects — icons, sculpted reliefs, carved wooden iconostases, and fragments of painted frescoes — from the ruins of hundreds of structures across Zakynthos.

The collection spans approximately the 15th to the 19th century and represents the full breadth of the Zakynthian school of Byzantine and post-Byzantine icon painting, which developed under Venetian rule with a distinctive blending of Byzantine iconographic conventions and Western European Renaissance influences. The most significant exhibits include large-scale frescoes removed from destroyed churches and reassembled within the museum, including works by Nikolaos Koutouzis and Nikolaos Kantounis, two of the most important Zakynthian painters of the 18th and 19th centuries. The carved wooden iconostases on display represent the finest surviving examples of Ionian ecclesiastical wood carving.

The museum layout is organized chronologically and by media, with separate galleries devoted to icons, ecclesiastical sculpture, applied arts (processional crosses, Gospel covers in silver), and the fresco hall. Labels are in Greek and English throughout. A selection of scale models of destroyed churches contextualizes the collection by showing where individual objects originally stood.

The building is on the same square as the Solomos Museum, making a combined visit to both institutions convenient. Both are closed on Mondays.