Artefacts in a new museum link modern, battered Gaza with past grandeur, when the area was a crossroad of great civilisations, writes Michael Jansenin Gaza
AL-MADHAF IS a sanctuary of sanity in violent, devastated and deprived Gaza.
Streams of school children climb down from buses, stride through the museum's black gate embellished with golden lines of Arabic poetry, and flow into the elegant entrance hall.
They pause to marvel at the massive marble base of the largest Roman column found in the Strip and the stumps of fallen pillars placed on a bed of stones in the centre of the room.
They sweep through the handsome wooden door of the museum - "madhaf" in Arabic - into a high rectangular room filled with antiquities from Gaza.
Teachers give their restive charges a brief lesson about the narrow coastal strip, the land-bridge between Egypt and the Levant.
The children see stone anchors, Bronze Age implements, Attic pottery, and bleached marble heads of classical Greek statuary, excavated from building sites or rescued by fishermen from the depths of the Mediterranean.
These artefacts link sad and sordid contemporary Gaza with past grandeur, while it was a crossroads of civilisations and a commercial hub.
Then blinking children file out of the dimly lit museum into the bright sunshine to leap, shrieking, on to inflatable toys in the playground before taking their seats at tables on the terrace for a snack.
The outing creates pride in Gaza's rich history. It was not always besieged and blockaded as it is today.
The children also take away from the experience a taste of life outside of that with which they are so familiar - crowded schools, poor homes and grim streets swamped with sewage and edged with smouldering garbage.
Jawdat Khoudary, the Gaza contractor who built al-Madhaf, surveys his chattering guests before remarking: "My dream is to have a national museum. It should have been done by the government, but it is not top of the . . . agenda." So he built his own. "A little museum is better than nothing."
Al-Madhaf, located on the coast near the Shati refugee camp, is the first museum in Palestine. "In three months we have had 15,000 visitors. In one way or the other I have succeeded. Now there is a lot of talk about a national museum."
Khoudary, a large, ebullient man, invited French archaeologist Alain Champu of the Louvre to advise on the construction of the museum and the display of its 350 artefacts.
The Madhaf is an act of resistance. "We started without materials." When Palestinian bulldozers toppled Israel's iron wall between Gaza and Egypt last January, Khoudary managed to bring in some bags of cement, which is banned here by Israel. He sent his teams to raid mounds of rubble from demolished buildings. Since sandy Gaza has no stones and few trees, he gathered stones, wood ties from the old railway and tiles from warehouses. For ceilings, they used huge sheets of copper once used by carpenters to decorate furniture.
"We could not bring in flagstones, so we cut the stones we used for the walls," he adds.
Architect Abdelkarim Gharbawi says the original idea was to build only a museum, but then they decided to add the restaurant and garden.
"We started the basic design on February 24th and began work on March 1st.There was no concrete to make a basement for the kitchen and storage rooms.
There were a few problems with the building but we finished almost everything by June. The museum was opened at the end of August."
The initial plan was for a one-storey building, but a second storey containing conference rooms is near completion. The conference rooms will host workshops and gatherings of Gazans who cannot leave the Strip but seek to better themselves with training or to discuss strategies to help them survive.
Khoudary intends to pause until materials are available before building a four-storey hotel above the restaurant and museum. He would also like to expand the museum to house more of his large collection.
But, he says, "we are living in very unstable conditions. I don't know what will happen tomorrow. There is a serious lack of raw materials and I don't want to take higher risks because of the political situation . . . It has been a challenge [to build al-Madhaf], but, to tell you the truth, I almost surrendered. You have to be crazy to do something like this."