Sponsors and Collaborations

Μany are those who have supported – and continue to support – our efforts from 1991 onwards. Private citizens, close friends and social acquaintances, collectors, organizations, foundations companies. The List of Sponsors – Supporters attests the breadth of interest they have shown.

Within this framework, the interest of sponsors was not limited just to providing funding. Another important aspect of support has been the provision of materials and services. Photographers, framers, paper merchants, printers, bookbinders, insurers and transporters of artworks, travel agents, hoteliers, in Greece mainly but also abroad, have contributed – each in his own way – to the bold vision of promoting a Collection linked to our country’s cultural past.

By the same token, with the scientific as well as the technical input of the Project’s collaborators, we have organized cultural events together with the sponsors, we have assisted them in publishing calendars and gift cards, drawing subjects from the Project’s work and mainly from the icons in the Collection, which, in a manner of speaking, each sponsor ‘adopted’ by covering the expenses of their conservation. We mention indicatively the desk diary of the corporate sponsor Iliopoulos – Kyriakopoulos SA (1996), the calendar and desk diary of the National Bank of Greece, and the highly original calendar of the I.M. Panagiotopoulos School with drawings by its pupils, who were inspired by icons in the Collection, on the subject: ‘I live my tradition. I face the future with identity’. Revenues from the sale of the calendar contributed to the costs of conserving the icon of The Deesis (18th century), which the pupils decided to ‘adopt’, at the invitation of the Benaki Museum.

Thanks to the generosity of Kraft Jacobs Suchard, the museum kit ‘The icon-painter’s workbox’ was reproduced in several copies, so that many more schools, even those in the remotest parts of Greece, were offered the opportunity of getting to know how a portable icon is made.

On 4 November 1997, we organized jointly with the Benaki Museum, the event ‘Tribute to the sponsors of the Velimezis Icon Collection Project’, in the Athens Concert Hall. It was attended by almost all sponsors and supporters till that time, as well as by many of the Project’s collaborators and personalities from the world of Art and Culture.