Originally scheduled to end in February, the National Museum will be extending the Egyptian “Kings of the Sun” exhibit until June 2021 because of all the missed time from the COVID-19 restrictions.
Michal Lukeš, General Director of the National Museum, said the exhibit might be the most important one of the last few decades.
“We felt bad that the largest and maybe the most important exhibition of the National Museum of the last few decades would be inaccessible to people, so we did some negotiating. Although this exhibition contains pieces from the Czech Republic and Germany, the most important things come directly from Egypt, so the final decision was on the Egyptian side.”
The exhibit contains three hundred different treasures in several halls of the museum. One-third of everything there had been taken from depositories in Cairo, and had never been exhibited or even left the Egyptian borders before.
“I think the Kings of the Sun exhibition is currently the only big foreign exhibition of Egyptian History. Representatives from the Egyptian Museum were used to having these types of projects all around the world, but right now they’re not able to organize anything like this,” Lukeš said.
The Kings Of the Sun exhibit contains pieces excavated in the Abusir archaeological site by Czech archaeologists over the years since the 1950s.
Lukeš says that despite the high cost of putting on the exhibit, they’ll probably be able to lower the price of the tickets.
“We had to supplement the insurance contracts, go through all the bureaucracy, and then we realised that the costs of the exhibition would be a lot higher than we originally thought. It’s not just about the insurance, there also has to be an Egyptian curator at the exhibition who has to live somewhere, take shifts with colleagues… So that all costs money too, but people are still paying for the exhibition and we believe, thanks to the great interest, we will reduce the higher costs of admission.”
Featured image via National Museum
