Delphi in a 360° Virtual Tour: The Official Digital Tour of All 13 Museum Halls

Of all the major archaeological sites in Greece, Delphi has the most complete digital presence. Very few people know it exists.

The Archaeological Museum of Delphi has an official digital tour, produced by the Ephorate of Antiquities of Phocis under the Greek Ministry of Culture, under the name Psifiakoi Delfoi. It is free, it opens in a browser with no app required, and it runs in Greek, English and French.

It is not one video or a photo gallery. It has three separate parts, and the third is the reason to read to the end.

1. All 13 museum halls, as a 3D walkthrough

The main part is a walkthrough of the museum halls, built on Matterport, the same spatial scanning technology used internationally for museums and property.

It covers all thirteen halls of the permanent exhibition, in the order a visitor walks them: The Beginnings of the Sanctuary, The Early Offerings, The Early Archaic Period, The Sacred Deposit with Gold and Ivory Objects, The Treasury of the Siphnians, The Temple of Apollo, The Treasury of the Athenians, The Hymns to Apollo and the White Kylix, Votive Offerings of the 5th century BC, The Tholos, The Late Classical and Hellenistic Period, The Late Hellenistic and Roman Period, and The Charioteer.

Each hall has its own page with the archaeological text beside the tour, so you read and look at the same time.

Open the 13 halls

3. A full tour in Greek Sign Language

The third part is the most interesting and the least known, and if you are reading in English you will almost certainly miss it.

On the English site this section is labelled only "Video Tour". That title tells you nothing. What it actually contains is a complete guided tour of the museum in Greek Sign Language, with a separate video for every hall. The Greek version of the page says so in its title. The English one does not. For a deaf visitor that is not an extra. It is the difference between being guided through a museum and looking at display cases.

Open the sign language tour

What it does not cover. The digital tour covers the museum, not the archaeological site. The Temple of Apollo, the Treasury of the Athenians as it stands today, the theatre and the stadium are not in any equivalent official tour. For the site itself you still have to go.

Why Delphi managed it. Meteora has no official virtual tour at all, and Vergina has none either. The difference is not technological. Somebody decided it was worth doing, found the funding, and did it properly, down to the sign language.

Two things are worth copying into any digitisation project. Accessibility, which here was built in rather than bolted on. And ownership: the Delphi tour runs on a third party platform, a question that has to be answered before a project starts. Talk to us.