Have you ever felt anxious in sympathy with a parent whose child just caused a catastrophic accident in a public place?
From Haifa, Israel, comes a story that will twist your insides just reading it—a 4-year-old who knocked over a Bronze Age vase that dates back 3,500 years.
Father Alex Geller didn’t see the vase crash on the floor, but he did hear the tell-tale sound of a ceramic object breaking, as he was just ahead of his son and wife in the Hecht Museum. Turning around, he said he was completely in shock.
“My wife responded faster than me,” he told AP. “She grabbed our son to take him outside and calm him down and explain that it was not okay what had happened.”
“My whole body and heart cringed for [the boy’s] poor parents,” writes the Guardian’s Isabelle Oderberg, just one of the flurry of media outlets covering the story. “I think if that had been me, I would have dug into the ground with my bare hands to live as a mole woman.”
But the tale took a happy turn, as despite being told the vase was exceptionally rare, being that it was found intact and not in pieces, the museum officials responded with poise and gentleness, saying that the museum is “not a mausoleum,” and is rather “a living place, open to families [and] accessible.”
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In fact, the museum has stated it wants to use the incident as a teaching opportunity—and it asked specifically for Geller and, most importantly, his son to come back and see how staff will put it back together.
“The jar was most likely originally intended to be used to carry local supplies, such as wine and olive oil,” reports the BBC. “It predates the time of the Biblical King David and King Solomon and is characteristic of the Canaan region on the eastern Mediterranean coast.”
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“Whenever possible, items are displayed without barriers or glass walls,” Inbal Rivlin, the museum’s general director, said in a statement. “The museum believes that there is a special charm in experiencing an archaeological find without any obstructions.”
The statement added the museum intends to continue the policy despite the mishap.
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