AT A GLANCE
Why go?
The Surinaams Legermuseum (Suriname Army Museum) is a small, hands-on military history museum tucked inside the Memre Boekoe army barracks in Paramaribo. Rather than a polished, purpose-built gallery, it is a living archive of the troops that have garrisoned Suriname for a century—old rifles and cannons, rusting armoured vehicles parked in the yard, a working library and the national military archive where you can leaf through regimental rolls bearing soldiers' names.↗↗↗
Its collection traces the history of the Troepenmacht in Suriname (TRIS), the Dutch military force stationed here during the colonial era, and of the Surinamese National Army that succeeded it after independence in 1975. The displays also follow a thread that surprises many visitors: the contribution Surinamese soldiers made to the Allied cause in the Second World War and later in the Korean War, fighting under the Dutch flag at a time when the Netherlands itself was occupied.↗↗
A museum in a living barracks
The museum occupies part of the Memre Boekoe-kazerne, a military base squeezed between the Verlengde Gemenelandsweg, the Rode Kruislaan and the Gravenberchstraat. The barracks were built by the Dutch for the TRIS and known around 1950 as the Prins Bernhard Kampement; after independence the Surinamese army took them over and renamed them Memre Boekoe, meaning "remember Boekoe"—an echo of the eighteenth-century interior fort from which the freedom fighter Boni resisted the Dutch colonisers. Visitors enter not through a grand façade but through a gate on the Rode Kruislaan, giving the whole visit the feel of stepping into an active garrison.
