How long have you been working at the SPK, and what are your responsibilities?
Nadja Cholidis: I can actually look back on a very traditional museum career spanning thirty years: I started in 1994 as a trainee at the Museum of the Ancient Near East (VAM), followed by two externally funded research projects and finally, in 2014, the long-awaited permanent position. For the past five years, as Deputy Director, I have been passing on my many years of expertise to the next generation. As a qualified archaeologist, cataloguing our collection is one of my core responsibilities, but over the years new areas have been added, such as researching the history of our exhibitions and provenance research.
Since 2023, our museum, which is housed in the south wing of the Pergamon Museum, has been closed due to the urgently needed comprehensive renovation of the building. As the VAM’s building representative, I have now been working for more than ten years to reconcile the collection’s user requirements with the architects’ plans. It is an exciting task because it offers so many opportunities and possibilities.
What is your favourite place at the SPK and what do you most enjoy doing there?
There are many wonderful places in the Museum of the Ancient Near East, but my absolute favourite spot is in an external depot in Friedrichshagen! Here, between 2001 and 2010, we restored a 3,000-year-old collection that had been destroyed during the Second World War – from 27,000 stone fragments! The workshops on the former site of the Office for Standardisation, Metrology and Product Testing had something magical about them right from the start; even on my first visit to the premises, I thought, what a fantastic building with internal balconies, 1970s charm, large windows and mysterious basement levels. Almost completely cut off from the outside world, there were even deer roaming between the buildings, and in summer you had to be careful that birds and mice didn’t stray into the workshop through the open gates. It will be several years, however, before the restored sculptures from Tell Halaf can be seen in the Pergamon Museum. Yet whenever I enter the former restoration workshop and see the lions, sphinxes, the griffin, the scorpion-bird man or the tomb sculptures, my heart inevitably beats faster.
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