Ancient beauty and modern strife collide at Tunis's Bardo museum

After the security guard cursorily checks our vehicle for bombs we drive into the car park of the Bardo museum in Tunis. I had expected it to be almost empty. Instead there are half a dozen coaches parked outside and scores of children playing noisily in the entrance. They skip around the flowers on the ground. A family smiles as they pose for a portrait next to the memorial; the father jokes as he drapes the Tunisian flag around his head like a scarf. I cannot help but feel priggish: two weeks earlier, this was where gunmen killed 23 people.

The attack shocked the only country to have made a peaceful transition to democracy after the 2011 Arab uprisings. It has tested its fragile constitutional settlement; leftist groups boycotted the Bardo reopening ceremony the week before my trip, citing the presence of an Islamist party. Human rights organisations worry that terrorism will be used as a pretext to reinforce the structure of the police state that they say the revolution left largely unchanged.

Businesses worry that foreigners will stay away, hurting an economy where tourism amounts to 7 per cent of gross domestic product and about one in three young Tunisians are unemployed.

I am cynical of hashtag activism so I cannot bring myself to tweet #JeSuisBardo. But on my first trip to Tunis I do want to spend my dinars, speak to Tunisians and pay my respects. I also really want to see the museum.

This Beylic palace houses totems of civilisation. The Bardo contains a collection of Roman mosaics whose intricate ordinariness bring to life the domestic lives of Carthaginians in a way no abraded column can. The Punic jewels and Christian baptisteries are magnificent. So too are the tablets showing translations between ancient languages.

Perturbed by the rowdy scene outside, I try to find quiet on the second floor of the vast white space. Here hangs the only contemporary portrait of the poet Virgil, flanked by the muses of history and tragedy. But the noise downstairs grows louder. It is impossible to concentrate.

I walk back to the ground floor where the children have taken over. One group of about 40 marches in pairs behind a banner, singing and acting up. A school teacher tells me in French that they have the first Sunday of every month off for activities and the class chose to come to the Bardo. He says many of the pupils have never been to Tunis before.

"They're coming out of curiosity but also out of solidarity," Aziza, an archaeologist at the museum, explains. She says that visitor numbers are up since the attack. She was not there on the day, she says, but adds that all of the staff who were on duty have since returned to work. "The art is just too beautiful to stay away - here is some of the best archaeology in the world." She tells me of a prehistoric religious artefact thought to be the oldest such monument in the world.

I go in search of it but now the kids are all over the place. A Tunisian lad in a red leather jacket fist bumps me and asks for a selfie (I have no idea why). A podgy child poses for his mother's photo next to a horseman and a sign-bearer from second century Carthage. Teenage girls giggle near the statue of Eros, while boys try to impress by showing them something on their phones. All around there is a sense of bustle and activity, of people enjoying being among these artefacts. A place of horrible death only weeks ago now seems full of life.

In its own way, almost by accident, the Bardo today feels like it is defying not only the gunmen, who murdered so many within its walls, but also those across the Middle East and north Africa who in recent years have ransacked museums and destroyed ancient sites. Thousands of young Tunisians are fighting with extremists in Syria, Iraq and Libya.

Against this nihilism stand the young people here, showing their parents the frayed horsehair poking out of a Roman statue, or the way the light glistens on the tiles of the Neptune mosaic. Curiosity is alive and well and there will be plenty of selfies to prove it.

I ask a guide where I can find the ancient religious burial exhibit that Aziza mentioned. It is temporarily closed for renovation, the man explains. "There is no prehistory today."

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