Days after the explosion that destroyed much of her city, Nadine Panayot entered the archaeological museum in Beirut expecting the worst.
The wooden doors on the grand old sandstone building had been torn off their hinges, the windows shattered. As the curator walked down the marble corridors, glass crunched under her feet.
Then she turned a corner and saw a wooden cabinet lying on the floor. Before a stockpile of ammonium nitrate ignited in the port on August 4, 2020, the case had held 74 glass artefacts, bottles, cups and lamps from the Roman era to the Islamic: fragile, precious and breakable.
Now all but two had been crushed into thousands of iridescent shards — some as thin as tissue paper, others just a few
