Libya's Red Castle museum opens for first time since fall of Gaddafi

By Ahmed Elumami

Libya's national museum, formerly known as As-Saraya Al-Hamra or the Red Castle, has reopened in Tripoli, allowing the public access to some of the country's finest historical treasures for the first time since the revolt that toppled Muammar Gaddafi.

The museum, Libya's largest, was closed in 2011 during a NATO-backed uprising against longtime ruler Gaddafi, who appeared on the castle's ramparts to deliver a fiery speech.

Renovations were started in March 2023 by the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity (GNU), which came to power in 2021 in a U.N.-backed political process.

"The reopening of the National Museum is not just a cultural moment but a live testimony that Libya is building its institutions," GNU Prime Minister Abdulhamid al-Dbiebah said at a reopening ceremony on Friday.

Built in the 1980s, the museum's 10,000 square meters of gallery space features mosaics and murals, sculptures, coins, and artefacts dating back to prehistoric times and stretching through Libya's Roman, Greek and Islamic periods.

The collection also includes millennia-old mummies from the ancient settlements of Uan Muhuggiag in Libya's deep south, and Jaghbub near its eastern border with Egypt.

"The current program focuses on enabling schools to visit the museum during this period, until it is officially opened to the public at the beginning of the year," museum director Fatima Abdullah Ahmed told Reuters.

Libya has since recovered 21 artefacts that were smuggled out of the country after Gaddafi's fall, notably from France, Switzerland, and the United States, the chairman of the board of directors of the antiquities department Mohamed Farj Shakshoki told Reuters ahead of the opening.

Shakshoki said that talks are ongoing to recover more than two dozen artefacts from Spain and others from Austria.

In 2022, Libya received nine artefacts, including funerary stone heads, urns and pottery from the U.S.

Libya houses five UNESCO World Heritage sites, which it said in 2016 were all endangered due to instability and conflict.

In July, Libya's delegation to UNESCO said the ancient city of Ghadames, one of the sites, had been removed from the list as the security situation had improved.