The Municipal Museum of Kavala occupies a 19th-century tobacco merchant's mansion and focuses on the city's modern history — the tobacco trade that made Kavala prosperous from the mid-19th century through the interwar period, the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey in 1923 that transformed the city's demographics, and the occupation of the Second World War. The collections include photographs, documents, costumes, and household objects from the late Ottoman and early 20th-century periods.
The tobacco industry context is particularly well handled. Kavala was one of the major tobacco-processing centres of the eastern Mediterranean, and the industry shaped the architecture of the lower town — the large warehouses near the waterfront were built to cure and pack tobacco for export. The museum explains this history clearly and gives context to a cityscape that can otherwise seem puzzling in its scale.