Digital Activities as Online Getaways to Cultural Heritage: The Paradigm of Greek Museums During the COVID-19 Era

The recent COVID-19 pandemic led most countries to impose lockdowns in order to confront its unprecedented health and socioeconomic impact. Museums and cultural institutions were obliged to keep their physical doors closed to the public; however, many of them undertook initiatives in order to maintain their communication with their audiences and to respond to the social need for alternative cultural experiences. They took new approaches to digital transformation and audience engagement by focusing on digital tools and solutions for innovative initiatives, virtual events, and communication activities. This paper aims to examine the museum management in Greece in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and to present museum initiatives that enabled the digital consumption of heritage and the increased virtual attendance of wider audiences via extrovert, online, interactive activities, and participatory experiences. For this purpose, a research was conducted in order to collect data from three Greek museums that are characterized by intense digital presence and activity: the Acropolis Museum, the Benaki Museum, and the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki. The research uses methods of qualitative and quantitative analysis and offers a critical insight into the particular museums’ extroversion and digital responses during two COVID-19 lockdown periods. The paper contributes to the identification of trends and new ways of enabling open access to cultural heritage resources and keeping cultural content relevant to the needs of society. Moreover, it attempts to outline the existing gaps and the arising challenges and opportunities for the museums’ digital strategy, resilience, and sustainability in the post-coronavirus world.