'Life returns' to Tunisia's newly restored Bardo national museum
One of the biggest museums in Africa, the Bardo in the Tunisan capital Tunis, is welcoming visitors once more after a two year of closure.
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Tunisia's national museum was ordered shut in July 2021, when President Kais Saied assumed wide-ranging powers and suspended parliament, which is located in the same complex.
After more than two years and extensive renovations, the Bardo reopened to the public on 14 September.
"Right from the first day, it was a great pleasure: a cruise came by, we welcomed around 800 travellers. There were 14 tourist buses," the museum's director, Fatma Nait Yghil, told RFI a few weeks later.
"Tunisians came too, people of all ages – children, adults, retirees. It's truly a pleasure to see this renaissance."
Rich history
Housed in a former palace that once belonged to an Ottoman governor, the Bardo boasts one of the world's finest collections of ancient Roman mosaics – including large-scale depictions of gods and heroes that once decorated the floors of luxurious villas built by its imperial rulers.
Its treasures also highlight home-grown artistic traditions, such as pieces of the traditional Sejnane pottery inscribed on Unesco's intangible cultural heritage list. They now take pride of place in newly installed display cases.
"You'll see, there have been a lot of renovations," Nait Yghil told RFI's correspondent Amira Souilem.
Though originally closed for security reasons, the museum took the opportunity to carry out maintenance and refurbishment work, the curator says, nearly a decade after its last major refit in 2012.
Among the changes is a marble statue of Concordia, the Roman goddess of harmony, which now stands on prominent display on the ground floor, next to a memorial to the victims of the 2015 terrorist attack in which Islamic State gunmen stormed the museum.
Twenty-one foreign tourists and a Tunisian police officer died in the attack, the deadliest of its kind in the country's history.
The decision to place Concordia at the museum's entryway is symbolic, says Nait Yghil: "It's to share a message of peace."
'Life returns'
Before it was ordered shut in 2015, the Bardo – the largest museum in Africa after Cairo's Egyptian Museum – attracted around a million visitors per year.
Its numbers remain far below that for now, but international guests have begun to return – welcome news in a country where the tourism industry represents around 7 percent of GDP.
"We've just spent an hour with our guide," said Jean-Michel, visiting from south-eastern France with his wife.
"It seems to me extremely rich in history. The mosaics are magnificent, I'm astonished you can even walk on some of them. The maintenance and restoration are really well done."
Tunisia's Ministry of Culture only announced the reopening in early September, less than 10 days before it went ahead.
Before then several of the country's leading cultural figures had expressed concern over the lengthy closure, writing in a joint letter in French newspaper Le Monde: "The reopening of the Bardo Museum is an emergency for culture, tourism, for Tunisia and for our shared history."
Now, as vistors admire its masterpieces once more, director Nait Yghil tells RFI she is overjoyed to see "life return" to the museum.
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