Visitors to museum top 158,600

Lakshmi de Silva

The number of people visiting the National Museum, Colombo has risen tremendously after May 19 to 158,680 up to the third week of August this year. There were only 70,000 visitors during the whole of last year.

"From mid-June, the number of visitors doubled and some days we had 4,000 to 5,000 visitors per day," Museum keeper Ranjith Hewage told the Daily News yesterday.

With the dawn of peace and relaxation of security, people from remote areas like Vavuniya, Trincomalee, Monaragala, Puttalam and other areas visited the National Museum and 75 percent of them were schoolchildren, he said.

"Unfortunately some people still do not know that on Friday the National Museum is closed; two to three buses still come on Friday but it is a waste of time and money," he said.

Principals and teachers should arrange educational tours to the museum in the morning while students are still fresh; they could spend some time to educate themselves before touring other places like the planetorium and Parliament, he said.

There are 3,000 articles and a skeleton at the museum that is more than 6,000 years from Sigiriya Pothana cave, the famous Vallipuram Gold Plate which describes King Vasabha ruling the entire country including Jaffna 2,000 years ago, the famous Samadhi statue that is more than 1,200 years and the Avalokitheshvara Bodhisathva statue, 1,100 years old - these are some of the interesting archaeological exhibits that one should not miss, he noted.