(London) Broken during the explosion that devastated Beirut in 2020, delicate glass containers dating back to antiquity for some have regained their integrity after meticulous work at the British Museum, where they will be exhibited.
Posted at 2:47 p.m.
“It’s a story of near destruction, restoration, resilience and collaboration,” said Hartwig Fischer, director of the famous British cultural institution, on Wednesday.
“Two years after the explosion in Beirut, we are delighted to exhibit these old glass containers”, which will then return to Lebanon by the end of the year, he added.
These pieces, flasks but also colorful utensils, were in a showcase at the American University of Beirut (AUB) when the shock wave from the explosion in the port, 3 km away, knocked it down.
Of the 74 pieces that fell, only two were recovered intact. Specialists have restored 26 of them, including the eight on display. Experts hope to soon rehabilitate at least half of the remaining 46.
The British Museum and AUB began collaborating on this project in 2021.
PHOTO SUSANNAH IRELAND, FRANCE-PRESSE AGENCY
Stella Scobie of the British Museum examines the restored antiquities.
A colossal task: each small shard of glass had to be sorted to determine whether it was a vestige of the exhibits… or of the showcase that contained them.
A sorting “done by eye and by hand”, looking at “the appearance of the surface and the shape of the glass”, explained Duygu Camurcuoglu, curator at the British Museum.
And that’s when the reconstruction of these giant puzzles began, using an adhesive. The hardest were “the big dish and the Byzantine carafe,” she recalled.
Curators agreed on the need to restore the structural integrity of the vessels.
But they decided not to remove the cracks and aesthetic imperfections of the reconstructed objects, to bear witness to the tragedy of August 4, 2020 which left more than 200 dead, 6,500 injured and devastated entire neighborhoods.
The exhibition at the British Museum will show the stages traversed by the objects, from their destruction to their arrival in the showcases.
“Patiently reconstructing these containers from very small pieces has made it possible to recognize their historical value”, welcomed Nadine Panayot, curator of the AUB archaeological museum, evoking “a healing process (which) also made me gives hope for a better future”.
These objects, the fruit of Greek, Byzantine and also Islamic know-how, illustrate the evolution of the techniques of glassblowers in the Middle East.