Museum sights in Algiers
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A
Bardo Museum of Prehistory & Ethnography
The Bardo Museum of Prehistory & Ethnography was built at the end of the 18th century as the country residence of a Tunisian prince exiled in Algiers. Enlarged by a Frenchman during the colonial period, it has been a museum since 1930, displaying the early history and later ethnology of the region. This includes some fabulous fossils, a collection of Neolithic pottery and stones, and particularly impressive rock carvings and paintings of horses and chariots brought from deep in the Sahara in the Tassili N’Ajjer region. Better still is the collection of urban artefacts in the ethnography section. See the elegant copper tea pot, the carved and painted wooden furniture and t…
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B
Palais des Raïs
The palace is in fact a row of several large waterfront houses, joined up to form a single compound and now home to the Centre des Arts et de la Culture. Palace 18, the main building, was begun in 1750 and completed around 1798 by the Dey Mustapha Pacha, who used it as one of his residences. The French military occupied it for a while, after which it served as the American consulate, a school and a library before becoming the most successful restoration project in the city. The buildings are used as exhibition space for some excellent shows, but much of the pleasure and interest is in seeing inside a grand, Ottoman-period mansion. The rooms are rarely massive, occasionall…
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C
National Museum of Antiquities
The richness of Algeria’s heritage is brought home in the understated but well chosen collection on display at the National Museum of Antiquities, a short walk from the Bardo Museum. The collection of antiquities is drawn from sites around the city and throughout Algeria. Among the early works are fine ivory carvings and large, totemic Libyan-period warriors on horseback. There is sculpture from Cherchell and mosaics from Tipaza, a room of bronzes including a wonderful fragment of a horse’s leg and hoof, and an extraordinary 3rd-century figure of a chubby child holding an eagle to its chest. There is also a collection of Islamic art from across the Maghreb. The museum s…
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Musée National du Moudjahid
This museum sits beneath the Makam Echahid, its mission to collect, preserve and display objects and memories of the struggle against colonialism. It starts with the story of the French invasion of 1830, but focuses on the glorious struggle from the uprising in Sétif, Constantine and Guelma in 1944 to Independence Day in July 1962. Although information is in Arabic, the meaning of the exhibits is easy to understand, from Abdelkader’s pistols to reports of executions of ‘terrorists’. The museum’s lower floor is a domed sanctuary, a natural shrine of low light and no noise, its walls inscribed with verses from the Quran.
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D
Museum of Popular Arts & Traditions
This museum is the most accessible of the buildings one can visit in the Casbah. It is housed in a fine example of an Ottoman-period town house, the Dar Khedaoudj el-Amia, which follows the classic town house plan, with an entrance leading to an inner hall and a staircase up to the principal rooms. The museum contains a fascinating collection of traditional Algerian arts and crafts.
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