NATIONAL BARDO MUSEUM

The Bardo Museum is housed in a former Ottoman villa in the heights of Algiers, which was built by a wealthy Tunisian in the late eighteenth century. Acquired by General Exelmans in 1830, it came back to the agha of Biskra, Ali Bey, in 1975 until it became the property of a certain Pierre Joret in 1879. A music lover and history enthusiast, he made major transformations to the villa without altering the place in order to give concerts, including that of Camille Saint-Saëns, and to host a collection of prehistoric pieces. In 1926, the villa was ceded to the French State, which transformed it into a Museum of Ethnography and Indigenous Art. Inaugurated in 1930, on the occasion of the centenary of colonization, the museum became the Museum of Prehistory and Ethnography and then the Bardo Museum in 1985, and was classified the same year as a historical monument. Nestled at the bottom of an exquisite garden, the villa, which combines the traditional elements of Ottoman architecture (precious woods, earthenware, wrought iron, low doors, baffles, green inner courtyard and its marble fountain basin, etc.), houses very interesting collections of remains discovered for the most part during excavations conducted in Algeria.

One comes to discover collections of prehistory coming from the Maghreb and the Sahara: paleolithic and neolithic tools, potteries, idols, etc. Also reproductions of rock frescoes. Also to be seen are the jaw and parietal fragments of an Atlanthropus mauritanicus, which lived about five hundred thousand years ago in Ternifine, in the Mascara region. Numerous protohistoric pieces such as bronze rings, engraved slabs... Tomb of Tinhinan, the legendary ancestor of the Tuareg, whose skeleton was found in 1926 near Abalessa in the Hoggar. A showcase reveals the queen's jewelry found in the tumulus housing her tomb. The whole part on the exhibition of Algerian jewelry is magnificent and exciting!

The ethnographic part is composed of an urban section (brassware, guns, sabers, Berber jewelry, traditional costumes of Constantine, Algiers, Tlemcen, pottery and chest of Kabylie ...), a Saharan section (collections of Hoggar: painted leather objects, saddles, shields, daggers ...) and a section devoted to black Africa.

The villa also houses the CNRPAH (National Center for Prehistoric, Anthropological and Historical Research), formerly CRAPE, created in 1955 and directed from 1969 to 1980 by the champion of Berber culture: Mouloud Mammeri.