PANDEKTIS Digital Treasury of Primary Sources for Greek History and Culture National Hellenic Research Foundation (EKT)

Overview

PANDEKTIS (Πανδέκτης) is an open-access digital repository maintained by the National Documentation Centre (EKT) of the National Hellenic Research Foundation (NHRF) in Athens, Greece. The name derives from the Greek word for a comprehensive collection or digest. The platform provides free online access to major digital collections documenting Greek history and civilization from antiquity to the modern era.

History and Founding

PANDEKTIS was officially launched on 3 April 2009, though development work began earlier under the auspices of EKT. The platform was developed using the open-source DSpace repository software, which was customized and configured to accommodate the specialized requirements of each hosted collection. The project emerged from a collaborative effort among the three humanistic research institutes of the National Hellenic Research Foundation: the Institute of Greek and Roman Antiquity, the Institute of Byzantine Research, and the Institute of Neohellenic Research.

Collections and Holdings

PANDEKTIS hosts eleven integrated digital collections covering all major periods of Greek history. These include ancient Greek and Latin inscriptions from Upper Macedonia, Aegean Thrace, and Achaia (presented in EpiDoc-encoded editions); Byzantine documentary material; a database of travel literature from the 15th to 19th centuries covering Southeast Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean; Greek cartography from the 15th century to 1820; a Modern Greek Visual Prosopography of approximately 10,000 digitized portraits; a heraldic database of Greece; records of Greek painters active between 1450 and 1830; a database of settlement name changes in Greece from 1913–1962; documentation of industrial heritage and workshops in the Aegean; a database of teachers active in 19th-century Greek public education; and the Greek Press Abroad collection.

Notable Materials

The Greek Press Abroad collection is particularly relevant to journalism and media research, providing documentation of Greek diaspora newspapers and periodicals published outside Greece. The Database of Travel Literature offers rich primary source material covering historical reporting on the Eastern Mediterranean region.

Access and Usage

All collections in PANDEKTIS are freely accessible online via the EKT infrastructure. The platform supports OAI-PMH for metadata harvesting and is listed in international registries including the Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR). Content can be searched through a unified interface across all eleven collections. The repository is aimed at the scientific community as well as the general public.