one of the oldest and arguably the most important museum in Brazil is burning to the ground as we speak. home to the portuguese royal family from 1808 to 1821, the Museu Nacional stored fossils, meteorites, pre-historic human skeletons and a variety of artefacts related to natural history. it holds two centuries of latin & brazilian history and now it’s all gone.
some of the things that are now lost forever: the largest collection of egyptian artefacts in latin america; the skeleton of the largest flying reptile ever found in Brazil; the oldest human fossil ever found in the country, named “Luzia” (over 11.000 y.o) and other 20 million extremely important relics and researches just burned to the ground. never to be seen again.
thanks to our government, of course, who didn’t want to pay the museum the necessary funds to make the essencial maintenances since 2014 (which by the way, costed less than a supreme federal court judge’s sallary: R$520 in a year).
another sad instance where the state’s indifference towards culture and history becomes painfully obvious. this is a massive blow to our cultural legacy.
all that in our independe week. happy independe for us, brazilians, who just lost our history and culture in a fire caused by ignorance and indifference.
in case you’re wondering, this is what the museum used to look like:
this is what it looks like now:
thousands of years of culture lost. happy independence week.
“Authorities say the fire lasted for six hours, causing irreparable damage. To put it bluntly: it’s all gone. A meteorite, that can sustain incredibly high temperatures, was found intact. But other than that, there are apparently no other pieces left. It would not be an understatement to call the Museu Nacional the Brazilian equivalent of the Louvre or the British Museum.”
here is some of the international news saying on this, because most articles and videos are all in portuguese, u can check some of the news in english: (here *new york times*) (here *bbc news*) (here *le monde* for french speaking readers) (here *shorouk news* for people who speak arabian) (here *azteca news* for spanish) (here *corriere della sera* for italian).
it was a natural science and historic museum, there were all sorts of important researches and relics. all burned. this was our culture. our history. the first human fossil found in brazil (mentioned above, Luzia) was so important for science, since it proved that way before indigenous tribes existed in Brazil, there were black people.
this is the place where our first constitution was made and the declaration of independence was signed. our independe day is this friday. heartbroken.
“We all knew the building was vulnerable.”
The hydrants nearby were dry; the building was old. It was the perfect storm of destruction, and a loss of this magnitude is devastating for the scientific community, for Brazil, and for the world.
Museums have the potential to do a lot of public good. One of the precious fossils this museum held was Luzia, mentioned above.
How much more could we have learned from her about the peopling of the Americas? What could her bones have told us about migration, about who the first people in Brazil were? And now she’s gone. She died again in that fire.
She’s not the only one, either. The museum held so much indigenous history, including many audio recordings of indigenous languages from all over Brazil. Some of these recordings, now lost, were of languages that are no longer spoken. Those languages are truly dead now- there’s no way to get those back. The natural history collections housed onsite? Gone. Some of those insect collections held unnamed species that are extinct and now we’ll never know about them.
And this isn’t just about the stuff, it’s about the people, too. The natural history and anthropology and fossil collections- how many scientists learned from them? How many kids fell in love with the natural world because of the displays? How many people were able to connect to the past because of those holdings?
Rio spent billions of dollars on the olympics, billions of dollars on stadiums that are now abandoned, less than two years later. The museum’s budget dropped to $84,000 last year. That was the whole budget for a museum that has served the world for two hundred years, a museum that was immensely valuable to the people of Brazil.
They’re never going to be able to rebuild, not to the scale they used to have. You don’t just build giant new natural history museums today- you can’t. The money doesn’t get allocated, the collections are impossible to reproduce. Two hundred years of cultural heritage and education are gone.
queerlybeloveds 