The British Museum displays ancient ships destroyed in the Beirut blast

Eight ancient glass vessels shattered in the 2020 Beirut blast will go on display at the British Museum from Thursday, guiding visitors through the painstaking international project to put them back together.

Dating back to the Roman, Byzantine and Islamic periods, the vessels have been reconstructed in the world-renowned museum’s restoration laboratories and will be on display as part of the Shattered Glass of Beirut showcase before returning to Lebanon later this year.

“(It) tells a story of near-destruction and reconstruction, of resilience and cooperation,” said Hartwig Fischer, director of the British Museum.

The ships were among the 74 in a case at the American University in Beirut (AUB).

The case fell when the shockwave from the port explosion, which occurred three kilometers away on August 4, 2020, hit the building and shattered the glass items inside.

A team of experts had the daunting task of sorting each piece of glass, deciding whether it was part of an antique vessel rather than a display case and which vessel it belonged to, Duygu Camurcuoglu, a senior conservator at the British Museum, told AFP.

“It’s pretty much all done by hand or by eye – basically mental work. You have to know certain techniques to be able to do this work,” she added.

After the parts were sorted, the restorers began using the mammoth puzzle game to put the vessels back together.

“It’s about using a glue to reconstruct the vessels,” Camurcuoglu said. But they couldn’t just use anything.

“We don’t use superglue, we don’t use UHU,” she joked.

The most difficult vessels were the “great bowl and the Byzantine jug,” Camurcuoglu recalled.

Eighteen of the ships have so far been preserved in Beirut as part of an emergency salvage campaign, along with the eight ships in the British Museum and two that survived the fall unscathed.

Experts hope that at least half of the remaining 46 objects in Beirut can soon be preserved.

The collaborative project between the British Museum and the AUB Archaeological Museum began in 2021 after an offer of help from the London institution.

Restorers agreed early on to make the ships structurally sound but leave imperfections caused by the breaking visible and witness the explosion.

The exhibition takes visitors on the journey through which the glass jars traveled from the moment of the explosion to their display in the famous London museum.

Lighting is used in the display to illuminate cracks and gaps in the glass.

“We really wanted to highlight the damage these objects suffered so that we can all look at the scars and remember how they were revived together,” Camurcuoglu said.

The vessels are considered important in telling the story of the development of revolutionary glassblowing techniques in Lebanon in the 1st century BC. that enabled the mass production of glass objects and made them available for general use.

Their restoration and the teamwork involved is a source of pride for the restorers, Camurcuoglu said.

“I think we all felt that by working on these objects we contributed – by sharing that pain, those emotions.

“So it’s not just about conservation… it’s also about working together and making things happen together,” she added.