National Library of Greece

The National Library of Greece (Ethnikí Vivliothíki tis Elládos) is the main public library of Greece, located in Athens. Founded by Ioannis Kapodistrias in 1832, its mission is to locate, collect, organize, describe and preserve the perpetual evidence of Greek culture and its uptake over time, as well as important representative evidence of human intellectual production. The NLG ensures equal non-access to these items based on the freedom of knowledge, information, and research. There is one general manager who serves a four-year term. A board of trustees has seven members with a three or four-year term. The original idea for establishing a National Library was from the philhellene Johann Jakob Mayer, in an August 1824 article of his newspaper Ellinika Chronika, published at Missolonghi, where Mayer and Lord Byron had been promoting Greece's independence. Mayer's idea was implemented in 1829 by the new Greek government of Ioannis Kapodistrias, who grouped together the National Library with other intellectual institutions such as schools, national museums, and printing houses. These were all placed in a building (then being used as an orphanage) on the island Aegina and supervised by Andreas Moustoxydis, who thus became president of the committee of the Orphanage, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Athens, and director of the National School. At the end of 1830, the library, which Moustoxydis named the National Library, had 1,018 volumes of printed books, which had been collected from Greeks and philhellenes. In 1834, the library was relocated to Athens, the new capital, and was at first housed temporarily in the public bath in the Roman Agora of Athens and then later in the Panagia Gorgoepikoos church. The collection increased rapidly. In addition to the purchase of books from private libraries, supervised by Dimitris Postolakas (1,995 volumes), the library accepted many large donations of books, like one from Christoforos and Konstantinos Sakellarios (5,400 volumes) and one from Markos Renieris (3,401 volumes).