Picture of the Day: Berlin

Berlin, Germany -- July, 2011

While we were in Berlin, the Pergamon Museum had an exhibit for artifacts from Tell Halaf. These artifacts were excavated in the early 20th century by German Max van Oppenheim, who discovered the Tell Halaf site in Syria. He brought many of them back to Berlin and created a museum. Unfortunately, this museum was in a wooden building, and when Berlin was bombed during WWII, the building burst into intensely hot flames, shattering the statues into tiny pieces.

All of the pieces that could be salvaged were kept for half a century, until, in 2002, they began the process of attempting to piece them together again. In the exhibit, they had a picture of the massive warehouse filled with all of these fragments. And somehow, they managed to reconstruct large portions of many of the statues, like the guy above. I thought it was a really awesome story  -- and a pretty cool exhibit (and yay for audioguides!).