Prague, Feb 4 (CTK) – An exhibition in Prague’s Naprstek Museum offers a unique collection of Buddhist artifacts from the 1st-9th centuries loaned from the National Museum of Afghanistan in Kabul, Michal Lukes, director of the National Museum in Prague, told reporters on the eve of the opening ceremony on Thursday.
“The exhibition is exceptional because organisers not always succeed in staging exhibitions of items coming directly from Afghanistan. As far as I know, this is a second such exhibition held in Europe,” Lukes said.
“Its exceptionality also lies in its complex preparations, since Afghanistan is still a war zone. Another interesting aspect is that we have helped save and restore a number of the items in cooperation with the Afghan side,” Lukes said.
The preparations took over three years.
The exhibition offers about 150 artifacts of a total insurance value of 100 million crowns, such as precious jewels, Buddhist sculptures, ceramic vessels and gold and silver coins.
An important step towards the event was the signing of a memorandum by the Afghan Culture Ministry and the Czech National Museum during President Milos Zeman’s working visit to Afghanistan in 2014, Lukes said.
Ghulam Nabi Farahi, Afghan state minister for parliamentary affairs, told the press conference on Thursday that the artifacts are a heritage from humankind’s common ancestors. They do not relate to Afghanistan only, but to the whole world, he said.
The exhibition, which runs through April 30, is another part of a series of international exhibitions, which was launched in the Naprstek Museum in 2014, acquainting the visitors with the cultures of Sudan, Azerbaijan and Bhutan so far.
