05 Dec 2018
Military Museums to build Afghanistan mission museum in Calgary
BY Luke Cloherty
The Military Museums (TMM) in Calgary, Canada, is planning to build a new permanent CA$50m (US$37.9m, €33.4m, £29.8m) museum devoted to the Afghanistan mission.
Covering around 10,000sq ft (929sq m), plans are to build it onto the existing TMM structure.
The museum will honour the 40,000-plus Canadians that served in Afghanistan and the 162 service men and women that died there between 2001 and 2014. It will feature lots of interactive material so that visitors can understand the war "through the eyes and voices of veterans".
TMM has been collecting what will form the backbone of the permanent museum for a travelling showcase, the Afghanistan Legacy exhibit, which will try to explain how the war affected Canada, but the museum has said it will likely not be confined only to the country.
"It will travel across Canada and perhaps more broadly," said Rory Cory, head curator at the Military Museums. "The Juno Beach Centre in France has expressed an interest in hosting it and we may send it to the Canadian Embassy in Washington. It will travel for the next four or five years while we are doing fundraising for the permanent installation here in Calgary. Then it comes back here for good."
The Military Museums is the second most attended war museum in the country, with the National War Museum in Ottawa the most. Cory says it was chosen as the site for the Afghan museum because many of the fallen from Canada in Afghanistan were from the Western Canada region, of which Calgary is part.
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