Tutankhamun’s tomb is coming to the Olympic Stadium

The Olympic Stadium will spend the winter as an Egyptian museum. From 5 November until late February it hosts Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition, brought to Amsterdam by former actor Jelle de Jong.

The premise is a journey 3,400 years back to the reign of the boy pharaoh, taking in the Egyptian court and the unresolved question of how he died. A heated pavilion of more than 2,400 square metres is being erected on the stadium pitch to house it.

Inside, projectors walk visitors through the mummification process, and a treasury displays replicas of the objects Howard Carter found in the tomb. A virtual reality section puts the visitor inside the burial chamber itself, waking in the dark.

A projection hall throws a film across 1,200 square metres of surface on walls eight metres high, and a second VR section hands visitors an oil lamp and lets them excavate.

De Jong has been building interactive historical exhibitions for five years through his Madrid studio, Madrid Artes Digitales.

He made this one in 2022 for the centenary of Carter’s discovery, working with Egyptologists and historians, and it has since drawn 2.7 million visitors internationally after runs in Germany and Egypt.

He describes the appeal as the improbability of the find itself: the only essentially intact pharaoh’s tomb, located after more than fifteen years of searching, with its gold still in place when a boy on Carter’s team lifted a stone and uncovered the steps down.

Source: Het Parool