In 1936, under the direction and with the support
of Henri Seyrig, Michel Écochard built a quite daring museum,
without windows and featuring a system of indirect light distribution. The
museum is located south of the Barada
River and east of the Ottoman era Tekkiyye Suleimaniyye. The architect's one-storey design stood in
stark contrast to the vertical lines of the Ottoman edifice. The new museum was
custom-built for its collections, with special rooms to house the paintings of the
Synagogue of Doura Europos and the reliefs of the Tomb of Yarhai from Palmyra, both
excavated in the earlier years of the French Mandate. Construction work to incorporate
the reliefs of the Umayyad palace of Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi onto the facade of the museum
began in 1939, but was completed only after the Second World War. In fact, one
of the features of the museum was its depiction of the Islamic period as only
one of the many important eras in the history of Syria.
Sources:
Écochard, Michel. Le nouveau musée de Damas. Paris: Office International des Musées, 1946. ( Mouseion 55-56 (1946): 107-143). Also
available on Archnet in the typewritten version prepared by Michel Ecochard in
Beirut in April 1945.
Heghnar Watenpaugh, "Museums and
the Construction of National History in Syria and Lebanon,” in Nadine Méouchy
and Peter Sluglett, editors, The British and French Mandates in Comparative
Perspective. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004. pp. 185-202
