After reconstruction for 1.8 billion CZK, the National Museum will partially reopen on Sunday

According to Lukeš, the museum's reconstruction was one of the largest and most complex repairs in modern Czech history. The building, which is a national cultural monument, was in a state of emergency and everything had to be repaired. Thanks to it, the exhibition space will be expanded by 30 percent.

"The building underwent a general reconstruction including all technologies, new distributions, and elevators. Dozens of different specialized professions and restorers worked on the construction, often needing to work with technologies that are no longer in use today. The Pantheon of the National Museum looks like it is entirely made of marble, but it is mostly made of artificially created marble, cleverly done. There were many gilders, plasterers, and finishers here," said Lukeš. According to him, the building will serve visitors entirely, as there are no deposits or offices in it.

A partial operation of the museum will be initiated by the Czech-Slovak / Slovak-Czech exhibition, which is prepared for the 100th anniversary of the establishment of Czechoslovakia and maps all key moments of the turbulent 20th century in Czechoslovakia, as well as the specific fates of ordinary people. For the first time in the Czech Republic, and indeed in the world, it brings together a collection of original documents that decisively influenced Czechoslovak history – the Pittsburgh Agreement, the Munich Agreement, the Vienna Arbitration, or the Czechoslovak ratifications of the peace treaties from Versailles, Saint Germain, and Trianon, which ended World War I. The exhibition premiered in Slovakia, where it was seen by 76,000 visitors.

"In two days, we will celebrate a hundred years since the establishment of the joint state of Czechs and Slovaks, and I am very glad that the Slovak Minister of Culture (Lubica Laššáková) is here with us, because I think that this century was very successful, and Czechoslovakia, although we have separated, we are still together, and it was a successful project, and we have something to look back on with pride," said Lukeš.

The exhibition 2 x 100 will present 200 of the most valuable and interesting exhibits from the museum's collections and recalls the 200th anniversary of the establishment of this collection institution. According to the director, it is a treasury exhibition; such a unique collection has never been exhibited in the Czech Republic before. Strict security measures will correspond to this. In the exhibition halls, there are display cases with exhibits behind strong bars. People will see, for example, a late antique vase from the time of the Migration Period, wedding dresses of Napoleon's wife, Barrandov's lithographic matrix with trilobites, the most famous Czech dinosaur bone, or a marble stele from Asia Minor over 2500 years old.

The general overhaul of the National Museum began in 2015, but the old building was closed for several years before that due to preparations. The original plan was to open the entire museum for the hundredth anniversary of the establishment of Czechoslovakia. However, in the first half of the work, progress was delayed by more extensive damage to the paintings in the Pantheon, archaeological findings, the discovery of asbestos, discrepancies in the project documentation, or changes requested by heritage professionals, the director stated earlier.