Museum of Illusions, Illusion museum in Monastiraki, Athens, Greece
The Museum of Illusions in Athens is a two-floor museum in the Monastiraki neighborhood, where each room is filled with optical tricks and visual experiments. A puzzle section and a shop are also part of the space.
The building was used as an inn in the 1800s before it was converted into the museum in 2018. The change brought a new function to a structure that had already served the neighborhood for well over a century.
The museum takes its name from the optical illusions it displays, and visitors are meant to interact with them: staff encourage guests to pose for photographs inside the exhibits, so the resulting pictures are part of the visit. The exhibits are grouped by theme, from mirror rooms to distorted rooms, and each carries a short explanation of the perceptual effect behind it.
The museum is open every day, which makes it easy to fit into a visit to central Athens. The rooms are compact, so most visitors can go through the whole space in one to two hours.
One of the rooms contains an Ames room, a specially built space where two people of the same height appear to be completely different sizes depending on where they stand. The effect works because the room is built with a distorted shape that looks normal from a single fixed viewpoint.
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