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After surviving the seven years of conflict in the country, the lion of Al Lat stone of 3 meters
The Polish archaeologist Bartosz Markowski sits in front of the lion of Al Lat, an ancient statue of the temple of the same name in Palmyra, during his visit to the National Museum of Antiquities in Damascus, the Syrian capital, on October 28 2018.
Damascus: The museum of antiquities in the war-torn Syrian capital reopened after six years on Sunday, with a two-thousand-year-old lion standing in the garden.
The open mouth, the lion of Al Lat three meters high, dominated by a fountain after surviving the seven years of conflict in the country and to the damage inflicted by Daesh.
The lion was just one of the exhibits after the reopening of one of the museum's wings, once again revealing some of its thousands of treasures for the first time since 2012.
Other parts of the museum will reopen soon.
The Damascus Museum, founded in 1920, was closed one year after the beginning of the civil war. Maamoun Abdul Karim, then national chief of antiquities, took measures to protect his works from rockets and looting by the rebels.
He was petrified by the fact that the country's museums would be looted as in neighboring Iraq after the 2003 US invasion.
"We closed all the doors of all Syrian museums … and we emptied all the rooms," said Abdul Karim.
As of 2012, museum authorities have stored some 300,000 articles and thousands of manuscripts in secret locations protected from fire, bombing and flooding.
The works come from 34 museums, of which 80,000 come from Damascus alone.
Antiquities manager Ahmad Deeb explained how they were protecting the objects.
"We put some in metal boxes. But we surrounded the big pieces that were difficult to transport with cement blocks to protect them, "he said.
Mosaics and tombs
The Capital Museum's gardens, however, have remained open to the public, even though rockets have struck the city intermittently from the nearby rebel stronghold of Ghouta East.
Hundreds of Syrian archaeological sites have been destroyed, damaged or looted since the beginning of the war, with all parties being held responsible for looting.
Part of the Damascus collection is again available to the public after President Bashar Al Assad's forces took over Eastern Ghouta earlier this year and secured the capital.
Inside, visitors could admire a century-old mosaic depicting a panther and a rooster.
They could again enter the elaborate burial chambers of the Yarhai family from the second century, located in the ancient city of Palmyra, in the center of the country.
The main sarcophagus is topped with a limestone sculpture depicting a man lying on his side, holding a goblet.
All around him, in what was once an underground burial chamber, limestone figures seem to be participating in a banquet.
The entire tomb was transferred from the UNESCO World Heritage Site of Palmyra to the capital in the 1930s.
Inside the closed museum of the capital, the tomb escaped destruction by Daesh when extremists invaded Palmyra in 2015.
But the lion of Al Lat was not so lucky.
The stone lion was first discovered at the temple of Al Lat, a pre-Islamic Arab goddess of war and peace, in Palmyra in 1977.
Bartosz Markowski, a Polish archaeologist, helped restore the statue in 2005 as a relief, only to see it ravaged by Daesh just ten years later.
New addition
"When Daesh arrived in Palmyra, they destroyed for the first time," he said.
The extremist group considers statues of human beings or animals as blasphemous.
Nicknamed among the Syrians the "pearl of the desert", Palmyra was home to some of the best preserved classical monuments in the Middle East.
But after their capture from the city, Daesh decapitated the former chief of antiquities of Palmyra, 82, and launched a campaign of destruction against his precious monuments.
After the revival of Palmyra by the Russian-backed regime forces in 2016, Markowski took part in a second restoration that ended a year ago.
An antelope rests between the legs of the lion, a hoof lying on one of the muscular legs of the lion.
"It was the first restored sculpture after the crisis and it was an important thing for the people," Markowski said.
"They could have seen the lion as a symbol … that the crisis is disappearing, but that the situation is slowly improving," he said.
Today, the Syrian regime controls about two thirds of the country.
This week, the Polish expert and his team brought the last touch to the lion by adding the nose of the antelope that had disappeared.
Palmyra Museum director Khalil Hariri said he hoped the lion would eventually return to his hometown.
"A room is more beautiful where it belongs," he said.
