The Museum of Byzantine Culture presents various aspects of life during the byzantine and post-byzantine periods: art, ideology, social structure and religion, as well as how historical changes and the political situation were affecting people' s everyday life. It was awarded the Council of Europe Museum Prize for 2005, following the concurrent recommendation of the Council' s Committee for Culture, Science and Education. The founding of the Museum of Byzantine Culture and its official opening in 1994 in Thessaloniki, the most "Byzantine" city of the modern Greek state, marks the end of a story that had begun long before, just after the city' s liberation in 1912.