After the 1978 earthquake, which caused considerable damage to the neo-classical mansion that once housed the Greek Consulate General in Thessaloniki, the building was restored and given to the "Friends of the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle" as a repository for all manner of relics and material documenting this significant chapter in Greece's modern history.

The idea of the Museum, however, was not new: in April 1917, not long after Macedonia had been integrated into Greece, the Provisional Government of Premier Venizelos enacted order 2134 establishing a "Macedonian Museum", although with a much broader scope. This Museum was to assemble

all the considerable archaeological finds marking the various historical and artistic periods through which Macedonia has passed, from antiquity to the end of the Ottoman era.

The process of creating the museum was continued in the 1940s by the Macedonian Fraternal Association for Education, while after 1950 the initiative passed to a group of private individuals, prominent public figures and descendants of famous Makedonomachoi. In the meantime the Archaeological Museum of Thessaloniki had been founded and the establishment of another museum for the Byzantine period had been decided.

This meant that what was needed was a more specialised institution, devoted exclusively to the period of the Macedonian Struggle. And so in December 1965 the Prime Minister of Greece, Stephanos Stephanopoulos signed the order providing for the founding of the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle in the building of the former Consulate General of Greece in Thessaloniki.

The vision became reality when on 27 October 1982 our Museum was formally opened by the President of the Hellenic Republic, Constantine Karamanlis. Some years later the responsibility for the Museum was assumed by the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle Foundation, which works closely with the Association of "Friends of the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle", three of whose members, in fact, by the terms of the Foundation's charter sit on its Board of Directors.