Al-Gezirah Museum is a highly prized national treasure that has been buried under the words ‘funding' and ‘budget'. In 1994, when a French delegation visited Egypt and saw the contents of the museum, they announced that great value of the artistic works there, and registered them on an international list of artworks. Assessing the value of the Nile-side museum's holdings is beyond imagination, since it owns works by Pablo Picasso that are worth $15 million and a number of paintings by Claude Monet that could be worth up to $50million a piece, as well as the statue by Auguste Rodin called the Thinking Man that is worth $65 million. The museum houses thousands of priceless works of famous Western artists like Picasso, Monet, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Delacroix, and more. It also includes 150 works by Eastern artists, who came with the French Campaign to make drawings of Egypt. The works in the museum are of different schools and represent the history of the arts worldwide, and for this reason it is hard to put a value on its holdings, which are priceless. The museum, one of the biggest in the Middle East, is located on the campus of the Cairo Opera House complex, and was founded by the Egyptian engineer Moustafa Fahmi Bey in1936. It was inaugurated in 1957 to display the belongings of the Mohamed Ali Family, but was closed in 1988 in hopes that it could be renovated and developed but it seems that renovation efforts were to no avail. Construction works on the museum started in 1990 with a budget of LE3 million that was dedicated for the museum. But work was suspended then, which added to the deterioration of the building. The building still contains valuable artistic treasures and priceless works. Every year the museum receives funding that is allocated for keeping it alive and that could help the Plastic Arts Sector to wrap up the first and second phases of the renovation process of the storage department, which a budget of LE30 million. But still the museum itself is waiting for at least LE60 million so that it could receive visitors again, and people could see the treasures that have been buried for more than 20 years. Head of the Plastic Arts Sector Mohssen Shaalan revealed that the museum holdings include more than 4,000 unique artistic works, among which is a huge group of Bohemian glass and another of Islamic glass that date back to the 11th and 18th centuries. Other treasures include porcelain and fabric works from Russia, Turkey, and China from several different epochs and a huge Coptic fabric collection of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries, as well as carpets and antiques that date back to the Mameluke era in Egypt, Iraq and China. There is also a number of artistic works, statues, and furniture that belongs to Mohamed Ali's Family. It would take more than a day to enjoy and explore all of the museum's hidden treasures.
