Damascus National Museum prepares to open after a seven-year hiatus

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

For seven years, the National Museum of Damascus was closed to visitors and now it is ready to receive guests again. Its discovery was announced by Maamoun Abdel Kerim, the Syrian head of the Department of Antiquities and Museums. The museum plans to open its doors on 28 September. For this event, it was decided to hold a seminar "The role of museums in strengthening national identity".

Abdel Kerim said during his interview that after the restoration of the building of the National Museum of Damascus, not all rooms will be open to visitors, but only half of all halls. The opening includes halls of ancient history, including those dedicated to the Byzantine and Greco-Roman periods, Islamic civilization.

It was noted that visitors who were in the museum before closing would also be interested, since the collection was replenished with exhibits that had not been exhibited before and are among the artifacts. Such exhibits were found in the hiding places of terrorists by the Syrian army. There was a possibility that such works of art could have been taken out of the country and perhaps no one else would have seen them. Now the museum is the owner of valuable items.

The collection of the National Museum of Damascus began to collect back in 1919. It included exhibits that could be found during excavations in different parts of Syria. The building of the museum was built a little later and was opened only in 1936. After its opening, it was rebuilt several times. In 1950, it was decided to decorate its facade with an accurate reconstruction of the gate of Qasr el-Kheir - an Umayyad castle, erected in the Palmyra region.

Cultural exhibits from the collection of the National Museum of Damascus can be seen not only within the building, some of them have been placed on the territory adjacent to the building. Among the exhibits that they decided to install on the street, the statue of the goddess Victoria with wings, created during the Roman era by South Syrian craftsmen, and the figure of a lion with a bull's head, stand out.

The most valuable exhibit in the Damascus Museum is a clay tablet found in 1949. This tablet bears the oldest alphabet, consisting of 30 cuneiform letters. This tablet was created in the XIV century BC. Also, the museum displays a huge number of other interesting exhibits created in ancient times.