A two-day educational program for children was conducted on 6th and 7th October 2007 at the National Archaeological Museum, on the initiative of artist Eleni Kotsonis. The program, titled “Parallel Stories”, centred on a presentation and discussion of the prehistoric settlements of Sesklo and Dimini in Thessaly and of Akrotiri on the island of Santorini (Thyra). The choice of subject was based on the fact that these specific settlements were destroyed by fire and a volcanic eruption respectively and allowed for parallels to be drawn between such disasters of the past and the recent fires in Greece. The program was organized and conducted in cooperation with the National Archaeological Museum and artists participating in the Emergency Room project. Artists Eleni Kotsonis and Maro Michalakakos and resident archaeologists Alexandra Christopoulos and Nayia Dalakouras welcomed a group of 40 children between the ages of 6 and 12.The program included a guided tour of rooms no.5 (The culture of the Neolithic period / Sesklo-Dimini) and no.48 (the murals of Akrotiri-Thyra) that familiarized the children with the architecture of these early settlements, as well as with the conditions that led to their destruction in the past. Tours were followed by a discussion of the notions of creation and destruction, after which the children worked together to create a model of the Sesklo acropolis, as well as to freely re-create the murals of Akrotiri. In the form of a “performance”, the above program stands as a comment on recent events in the news and has substituted, in terms of time, an “emergency” work by artists Eleni Kotsonis and Maro Michalakakos.
