Greece’s National Archaeological Museum (NAM) welcomed more than 590,000 visitors last year, recording a rise of 8.9 percent from 2017 and 29 percent over the past three years, the director of the respected institution, Dr Maria Lagogianni, said on Monday.

“It is hard to describe the performance of an entire year without the help of numbers,” Lagogianni told journalists at NAM’s annual press conference in Athens.

The country’s biggest museum also hosted 122 international research programs and participated in eight exhibitions of ancient artifacts in Greece and other parts of the world, loaning out 191 pieces from its collection, Lagogianni said.

An exhibition on the Roman-era Antikythera shipwreck, featuring items from the NAM collection, which opened in Beijing, China on September 14, has received a record 16,000 visitors a day on average. It was recently extended to February 14 due to popular demand.

This article was first published on ekathimerini.com