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Tahrir Square is considered as the birthplace of the Egyptian revolution, and the museum is like a thermometer:"It gets affected by the political situation at the square," said Sayed Amer, the director of the Egyptian Museum, in a recent interview with "The Associated Press".
It has launched an extensive renovation for the palatial, 111-year-old salmon-colored building. The décor will get a makeover, and lighting and security systems will be upgraded in an overhaul, in cooperation with Germany, costing more than $4.3 million.
Plans are also being drawn up to demolish the neighboring former headquarters of Mubarak's National Democratic Party, which was burned during the uprising, to create an open-air, Nile-side exhibition garden for the museum.
King Tut's treasures will be moved to a new Grand Egyptian Museum (GEM) under construction near the Giza pyramids, due to be finished in 2015. In the Cairo Museum there is more tha half it's collection in the basement storage and we will be soon able to see it.Amid the budget crunch, staffers are trying to find other sources of revenue.
Yasmin El-Shazly, the head of the Documentation Department that tracks the museum's 200,000 items, set up a fundraising mechanism to bring in donations for the museum independently of the government.
Donations collected by the Friends of the Egyptian Museum group will help fund academic research in the museum, raise awareness of its projects and empower Egyptian experts and museum's staff, who have gone without salaries for months.
the ministry's revenues, including the entrance fees from tourist sites, fell from 111 million Egyptian pounds ($16 million) in October 2010 to 7 million Egyptian pounds ($1.14 million) in October 2013. We hope foreigners will come back now to visit Egypt, now that the situation is good for this return.
Photo©AntoineGigal2013
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