After nearly five years of closure, the Idleb museum reopened its doors on Monday August 13, 2018 in Syria with the exhibition of a small part of its collection, the institution not having escaped the war which is ravaging the country.
A visitor looks at antique oil lamps in the Idlib Museum after its partial reopening on August 13, 2018 in the northwestern Syrian city of Idlib.
Two unique rooms will be accessible to the public, who will be able to discover mosaics, statues, column capitals, but also amphorae, oil lamps and other clay utensils and containers dating back to Antiquity. The reopening on Monday August 13, 2018 of this museum in a region still at war was launched by a local team of academicians and archaeologists while the institution had been closed since 2013. Already on Monday August 13, 2018, a few dozen visitors have wandered among the remains that they took pictures with their cell phones.
Clay tablets
"We have carried out restoration and maintenance work in the Idleb Museum to bring it back to life “, told AFP the head of the archaeological sites of Idlib, Ayman al-Nabo, on the sidelines of the inauguration. “This is a message to the whole world, and more particularly to UNESCO, to that it assumes its role vis-à-vis the archaeological sites " from Idlib, insists the official.
Dominated by the jihadist group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, the province of Idleb (north-west) is rich in museums and archaeological sites dating back to antiquity, including the city of Ebla, erected at the time of one of the oldest kingdoms of Syria. Land of multiple civilizations, from the Canaanites to the Ottomans, Syria is full of treasures dating from the Roman, Mamluk and Byzantine eras, with mosques, churches and Crusader castles. Six sites in the country are listed as UNESCO World Heritage Sites and some have not escaped the destructive violence of the war that has ravaged the country since 2011.The Idlib museum team wants to "organize visits for the whole generation of students who have not been able to visit archaeological sites because of the war ", underlines Mr. Nabo. Opened in 1989, the Idlib museum brought together before the war most of the objects unearthed during the excavations of Ebla, a site known for its clay tablets dating from 2,400 to 2,300 BC which bear witness to the invention of the first alphabet.
During the early years of the conflict, the ancient city of Ebla was looted and ravaged by fighting between rebels and the regime, while the Idlib museum was targeted by air raids. The former director of Syrian Antiquities, Maamoun Abdel Karim, had assured AFP in the past that "the vast majority of archaeological objects in Syrian museums had been saved and placed in safe places in Damascus ". Among the visitors of August 13, 2018, the archaeologist Fayez Kawssara. "I experienced the creation of the Idlib museum in my youth (...) and today after all these dark years, it reopens again, with what remains of the remains ", he sighs.