A Sneak Peek At The Soon-To-Reopen National Museum Of Iraq

by Sean McLachlan on


The National Museum of Iraq is as battered and defiant as the country it represents. Battered because it has suffered looting and neglect, defiant because its staff fought to protect it. Now they’re rebuilding and the museum will soon reopen.

I got a sneak peak while visiting Iraq and was overawed. I knew I would be. Here is the treasure house of the dawn of civilization. Giant statues of Assyrian guardian demons stand next to cases filled with wide-eyed Sumerian statues pleading with their gods. Detailed bas-reliefs from excavated palaces show scenes of war and hunting. Cases full of cylinder seals show scenes of Babylonian life in miniature.

My favorite was the writing. The first scribes developed a simple system around 3300 B.C. or even earlier. Clay tokens represented objects such as sheep or jugs of beer. These were often sealed in clay envelopes with an impression of the tokens on the outside, thus creating the first contracts. Soon tablets were used with a system of writing that was mostly pictorial – a bull’s head represented a bull, etc. As the needs of the developing civilization grew more complex, so did the system of writing. The pictures morphed into almost unrecognizable collections of lines, and words for abstract ideas appeared. The writing was done with a stylus on soft clay to make a series of wedge-shaped impressions called cuneiform.

Looking at these ancient texts was hypnotic. The same process we’re engaged in right now, with me writing and you reading, was going on 5,000 years ago in a vastly different culture. We don’t have to know each other or even be in the same country to communicate. It was an incredible innovation that opened up countless possibilities for the human race.

As I studied the galleries I was amazed that anything survived the chaotic days after the fall of Baghdad in 2003. The Coalition troops hadn’t been given any instructions to protect the museum, so looters broke in and ransacked the place. Museum staff came back in force and drove them off, a brave act considering the looters were armed. Eventually the museum workers convinced the U.S. Army to post some guards.

It was too late. Thousands of priceless artifacts had been stolen. Some were later recovered but most have disappeared into the private homes of “collectors.” Luckily, the museum staff had hidden some of the best artifacts in secret locations. They told no one, not even the Coalition, about their existence until the situation had stabilized.

%Gallery-170304%Now workers are busy finishing up the displays. Twenty-two galleries have been completed and there are five more to go. Some rooms survived the war relatively intact and will look familiar to those who were lucky enough to visit before the war. Others have been completely remodeled. The museum officials didn’t allow me to photograph those. It seemed an odd restriction. Wouldn’t they want people to see their hard work? When traveling in Iraq, you get used to random rules. You just have to shrug your shoulders and move on.

In one room I found a member of the staff restoring an Abbasid sarcophagus made of teak. As I studied the intricately carved designs he explained in perfect English that he was filling in the cracks and chips with a paste made from powdered teak and “micro balloons,” tiny polymer spheres that act as a chemically inert adhesive. I asked if I could take a picture of his work and he said no.

“That’s the museum’s rule, not mine,” he said apologetically.

He and his coworkers have done a good job. The difference between the traditional galleries and the remodeled ones is astounding. The new galleries have better lighting and signage and show off the museum’s artifacts to much better advantage. All the galleries, both new and old, have signage in both Arabic and English.

The National Museum of Iraq is due to have a grand reopening in two months. As with everything in this struggling nation, the date is subject to change due to security issues and funds not getting to the right place at the right time. The work is almost done, though, so one of the greatest museums in the Middle East will almost certainly reopen in 2013 to teach a new generation of visitors about the wonders of Iraq’s past.

Don’t miss the rest of my series, “Destination: Iraq,” chronicling my 17-day journey across this strife-ridden country in search of adventure, archaeology and AK-47s.

Coming up next: “Ghosts Of A Dictatorship: Visiting Saddam’s Palaces!”

All photos by Sean McLachlan

Paris’ Treasure-house Of Mysterious Medieval Marvels: The Cluny Museum

by David Downie on

What Do Paris, Saint James, Scallop Shells, Pilgrims And Primitive Under-Floor Heating Share With Unicorns And Abbots?

Easy: Paris‘s Cluny Museum, officially France‘s National Museum of the Middle Ages.

Deciphering the mysteries of this riddle is as easy as clambering up the wooden staircases of the museum and poking through the labyrinth of its cluttered rooms.

Look at the hewn stone and massive brick walls. They might be in the Roman Forum. Correct, the Cluny Museum occupies a medieval-Renaissance mansion built into the ruins of an ancient bathhouse. It’s the oldest building in Paris, exuding atmosphere scented by beeswax. Once the Paris home of the fabulously rich Abbots of Cluny, for nearly 1,000 years Rome’s right-hand man lived here, possibly in greater comfort than a king.

Spiral or sweeping stone staircases, mullioned windows, Gothic gables and vast salons with massive timbers and mammoth fireplaces, stained-glass windows, secret passageways and sublime keyhole views: this was the abbot’s little Paris hideaway. The rest of the time he lived in an even more sumptuous residence in the town of Cluny in Burgundy.
Somewhat reduced by 19th-century modernizers and other urban vandals, the garden of the Cluny Museum once swept all the way from today’s Boulevard Saint Germain to the Seine. Now it’s a small, mossy enclave where fountains splash and the kinds of herbs and medicinal plants the monks once tended grow in symmetrical beds.

Cluny Abbey represented the money and ecclesiastical power of the Church of Rome. Cluny helped map out and build the pilgrimage routes of France (and other European countries). Those routes, dotted with lucrative, Cluny-run monasteries, still lead to the shrine of Saint James the Greater – alias Santiago or Saint Jacques – in Compostela. That’s in Galicia, Spain.Scallop shells are the symbol of Saint James; the French call them coquilles Saint-Jacques and gobble them by the million. That’s why they’re piled outside restaurants and clustered like barnacles over the façade and even the giant doors of the Cluny Museum. Pilgrims draped with real scallop shells still show up at the Cluny. Why? It’s about 100 yards off the Rue Saint-Jacques, the Way of Saint James pilgrimage route that crosses Paris, blazes due south and, at least in theory, crosses France and the Pyrenees into Spain.

The Cluny Museum was one of our first stops on the Way of Saint James, when my wife and I crossed France on foot from Paris to the Pyrenees, an insane undertaking and the subject of an upcoming book about contemporary craziness and questing.

As to the unicorns, slightly faded after 500 years, they romp across the “Lady and the Unicorn” tapestries hanging in a dark upstairs room in the museum. Reverential silence reigns. For unknown reasons the air is close: bated breath, heavy breathing or faulty air conditioning? No matter. Find a seat if you can and wait until your eyes adjust to the gloom. The room is a secular pilgrimage site for anyone interested – not to say obsessed – with unicorns or the initiatory mysteries of adolescence. No one is entirely sure but most art historians speculate that the tapestries represent the human senses plus one: feminine intuition. They’re also probably about sexual initiation, the unicorn a suggestive symbol of what awaits the comely maiden shown in this mesmerizing artwork.



Original stained-glass windows rescued from the Sainte-Chapelle and half a dozen cathedrals twinkle, backlit, on the walls of a small room at the Cluny. For those like me, with imperfect vision, these usually distant gems are close enough to see the tiniest, often gruesome details. Heads are hacked off, devils ride horses, dragons are slayed, and, of course, saints are flayed or blinded.

Oh, and what about the under-floor heating? To find out head to the caldarium, tepidarium and frigidarium – vaulted Roman bathrooms below today’s street level. Everyone knows under-floor heating was an ancient Roman invention widely used in Lutetia Parisiorum – the ancient Roman name for Paris. The hypocausts – brick ovens for heating water pumped under the caldarium and tepidarium – still stand along Boulevard Saint Michel.

Once floored with mosaics and decorated with frescos, the Roman rooms now display the battered décor of ancient Lutetia Parisiorum. Sculpted stones show the guild of Seine mariners. There are portrait busts, carved ivory and architectural fragments galore. Some were found under Notre Dame Cathedral, site of an ancient Roman temple and defensive wall. Others surfaced during digs elsewhere in town. The cracked heads of the kings of the Old Testament, knocked off Notre Dame by rioting French Revolutionaries, stare down at you. Part of the once exquisite, wrecked cloister of Saint Germain des Prés surrounds an entry.

Beyond the museum’s gorgeous booty spanning the centuries, it’s the feel of the Cluny that I love most. And the fact that long before the abbots and pilgrims congregated here my mysterious hero, Emperor Julian the Apostate, was crowned at Cluny by his troops back in 360 A.D. Julian adored Lutetia Parisiorum. Not only did he try to reinstitute paganism as Rome’s official religion, he was also the first recorded Roman to get rid of the tongue-twisting name and call this layer-cake city by its modern moniker: Paris.

Author and private walking-tour guide David Downie’s latest book is the critically acclaimed “Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light,” soon to be an audiobook. His next adventure-memoir, to be published in April 2013, is “Paris to the Pyrenees: A Skeptic Pilgrim Walks the Way of Saint James.” His websites are www.davidddownie.com, www.parisparistours.com, http://wanderingfrance.com/blog/paris and http://wanderingliguria.com, dedicated to the
Italian Riviera.

[Photos by the author or courtesy of Wikipedia Commons]

Roadside America: PEZ Visitors’ Center, Orange, Connecticut

by Meg Nesterov on

I have to congratulate the good people at PEZ for their excellent signage. I had no intention of spending any time or money on candy, but when we spotted signs for the PEZ Visitors’ Center in Orange, Connecticut, we thought it was worth a closer look. I was driving from New Haven to New York with my mother and baby daughter (neither of which is currently a big candy connoisseur, but we all loved it), and a few minutes from following the signs off I-95, we were in front of several giant packages of PEZ candy.

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For a few bucks each ($5 for adults, including $2 in store credit), we were soon immersed in all things PEZ. Invented in the 1920s in Austria, PEZ was originally intended as a smoking substitute and the first dispenser was created to look like a cigarette lighter, without the “head” now so integral to the PEZ experience. Introduced to the US market in the 1950s, the US factory has been located in Connecticut since 1974. The Visitors’ Center is a combination museum and store, with windows onto the factory floor, and filled with interactive exhibits and videos about the PEZ-making process and history.The real fun, of course, is selecting your own PEZ candy to take home. You can choose from dozens of favorite characters from Harry Potter to Winnie the Pooh, as well as visitor center exclusives, like a reproduction of the original dispensers. You can also design your own dispenser and select your favorite flavors (they now have chocolate PEZ but peppermint is a thing of the past) to fill it, provided you are partial to stickers and markers for personalizing. As a traveler, I would have liked to see more of the foreign PEZ containers to take home, but there is a large variety on display, and it just may inspire me to visit the world headquarters in Austria, or the dispenser factory in Hungary.

Get your sugar high at the PEZ Visitors’ Center and Factory in Orange, Connecticut.

[Photo credit: Meg Nesterov]

New Art Exhibition Features ‘Banned Booty’ Confiscated From Airport Security Checkpoints

by Jessica Marati on

Ever wonder what happens to the tweezers, sewing scissors and Swiss Army Knives abandoned by hapless travelers at airport security? While most probably ended up in the landfill, some contraband nail clippers have received a second life through a new contemporary art exhibit from California artist Steve Maloney.

The exhibit, called “Banned Booty – Palm Springs Checkpoint,” opens October 18 at the Palm Springs Air Museum in Palm Springs, California. It will feature mixed-media installation pieces created from items, mostly sharp-ended, that were confiscated from carry-on luggage by the Travel Security Administration at the Palm Springs International Airport. The exhibit’s intention is “to ‘continue the conversation’ about present-day air travel,” particularly its relation to everyday lives and the city of Palm Springs, says a press release. According to Maloney:

American travel changed radically after September 11, 2001. The Banned Booty series captures a small aspect of this change. What used to be routine – checking into a flight and passing through the final security check point with no concern for the nail files or scissors stuffed in your bag – was transformed into a drawn-out endeavor.

The exhibit’s opening day will feature guests like Mayor Steve Pougnet, Palm Springs City Councilman Paul Lewin and Shannon Garcia-Hamilton, Federal Security Director for the TSA in Palm Springs, who will gather to participate in that conversation first-hand. For more information, visit BannedBooty.com.

London Construction Reveals Medieval Graves, Bronze Age Road

by Sean McLachlan on

London is built on layers of its own past. Occasionally they poke through to the present, like the old Roman walls and the Temple of Mithras. Now two current construction projects have revealed glimpses of the city’s previous epochs.

Work to build a leisure center at Elephant and Castle has uncovered some 500 medieval skeletons, the London Evening Standard reports. They were interred in 25 crypts. It appears they were relocated into the crypts in 1875 to accommodate a widening of the road but date as far back as the early 14th century. Now new construction dictates they’ll have to be reinterred again. Not even the dead get to rest long in London!

Another project creating a new tunnel for Crossrail at Plumstead has uncovered a much older transport system, the BBC reports. Archaeologists believe timbers they’ve discovered at the site are part of a 3,500-year-old Bronze Age trackway.

These wooden roads were used to ease travel across rough areas, especially wetlands. Similar trackways have been found in many locations in the UK and continental Europe. The odd thing about this one is that it runs along the same route as the new Crossrail route.

One great place to explore London’s history is the Museum of London. The British Museum has good galleries about prehistoric, Roman and Medieval England. The Crossrail Visitor Information Centre also has an archaeology exhibit until October 27 showing off some of their discoveries. The finds range from the prehistoric to the Industrial Revolution, although these latest finds are still being analyzed and will not be on display.

[Image of 15th century funeral procession at the Old St. Paul’s cathedral courtesy Project Gutenberg]