Celebrating Alexandria's youth
The fabled city of Alexandria is getting its very own national museum. Nevine El-Aref watches the project unfold
Visitors to Alexandria will soon be able to enjoy an elegant display of the Mediterranean city's glorious past, thanks to a new national museum set to be inaugurated later this month by President Hosni Mubarak.
The new museum is located in the former premises of the US Consulate on Fouad Street near Alexandria's city centre. It is housed in an attractive 1500-square-metre three-storey palace with 25 uniquely decorated rooms, surrounded by a 900-square-metre garden featuring 39 rare species of trees and plants.
The museum will be a showcase for 1900 artefacts spanning the spectrum of the city's history, all of which have never been on display before.
Restorers and technicians are currently putting the finishing touches on the work at hand. Curators are unpacking the artefacts, while a crew of carpenters, painters and technicians are busy polishing the walls, cleaning the floors, and fixing the lights.
"Converting this exquisite early 20th century building into a state-of-the-art antiquities museum is not an easy task," said Culture Minister Farouk Hosni. Constructing a new museum with all the necessary facilities would have been much easier than converting a classic building, Hosni opined.
Amongst the issues that had to be dealt with, said the minister, was how to create distinguished and attractive displays without negatively affecting the building's magnificent architecture and interior design.
To maintain the balance as well as leave plenty of open space, Hosni told Al-Ahram Weekly, Italian designer Maurizzio De Paulo invented an extraordinarily sophisticated display -- including hanging diagonal glass showcases being used for the first time in Egypt -- that helps maintain the harmony between the museum's interior design and the artefacts on show.
Ayman Abdel-Moneim, the man in charge of establishing the museum, described the process as "a philosophy of colours". To provide an ethereal ambiance, the walls of every section in the museum were painted in different colours symbolic of the religious beliefs of each era. The Pharaonic section has dark blue walls representing the trip to an eternal afterlife, while the Graeco-Roman section features a sky blue backdrop reflecting that era's romance and love of life. To symbolise Coptic and Muslim beliefs concerning heaven, both sections have been painted green.
Abdel-Moneim is of the opinion that the museum's unique interior design would probably put it on the same internationally renowned footing as the Nubian museum in Aswan.
The 1900 objects on display, meanwhile, were all either excavated from different sites in and around Alexandria, or else taken from the storehouses of Egypt's four main museums. Visitors will proceed through the exhibits in chronological order, with the first floor devoted to the Pharaonic items, the second to those from the Graeco-Roman period, and the third focussed on Coptic and Islamic items. There is also a section dedicated to the jewellery of Mohamed Ali's family.
Among the masterpieces on display: a statue of the Roman Emperor Hadrian; a red granite statue of Emperor Caracala; a statue of the Pharaonic King Menkaure; and 162 gold and silver Islamic and Graeco-Roman coins minted in Alexandria.
Museum Director Ibrahim Darwish said that the black basalt statue of an Isis temple priest extracted from the seabed in 1998 is also on display, as is the stela discovered amongst the sunken ruins of Heraklion.
The palace's basement has been transformed into a high-tech restoration laboratory, while the building formerly used as a garage by the consulate's staff has been converted into a lecture hall and an open-air theatre for cultural performance after dark.
"The National Alexandria Museum is the first in a series of national museums being built around Egypt," said Zahi Hawass, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). According to Hawass, the project aims to provide "our priceless treasures with more space, better lighting and more information that better matches our exquisite heritage". He said similar museums documenting the history of Egyptian cities would be implemented in Aswan, Mansoura, Sohag and Damietta.
Well-known lumber trader Bassili Pasha built the palace in 1929, and sold it to the American consulate in 1960. In 1997, the Ministry of Culture bought the property for a paltry LE12 million.
According to Mahmoud Mabrouk, head of the SCA's museums department, "It was an excellent opportunity for the SCA to buy a huge and architecturally beautiful building at this kind of price." Mabrouk said a businessman had tried to buy it for LE35 million but the Americans chose to sell it to the SCA, which made clear their plans to preserve the building's architectural integrity. Mabrouk described the transformation of the building into a museum as "a revival of Alexandria's youth".
