Kavala’ s close relationship with tobacco work and trade brought about the need to examine this part of the city’s history. At times a lot of researchers, students, journalists and others have dealt with the subject and have published books or have written articles, whilst a lot of citizens have been made aware and thus have offered objects, photographs and documents to the Municipal Tobacco Museum.

In the year 1996 an exhibition under the title “Kavala, yesterday’s tobacco city” was organized, with exhibits offered by the families of tobacco merchants from Kavala (Iordanoglou Bros., A. Tsimino, and others). In 2002 an initiative attempted to gather material of any kind (tools, documents, machines, devices, etc.).

The exhibition opened to the public on the 5th of April 2003 on the ground floor of the building where once the Greek Organisation for Tobacco (EOT) was housed. The showroom was offered by the Minister for Agriculture at that time, Mr. Georgios Dris (the room that houses the Museum at present used to be the exhibition room of EOT since 1972).