Libya declared itself liberated on Sunday after 42 years of rule by Muammar Gaddafi ended with his capture and death last week, setting the North African state on course for a transition towards democracy.
Tens of thousands, who before this year's revolt had known nothing but Gaddafi's all-powerful police state, packed a square in the second city Benghazi to hear the interim National Transitional Council (NTC) announce the country had freed itself completely from his rule.
Some fear NTC chief Mustafa Abdel Jalil will struggle to impose his will on his well armed but fragmenting revolutionary alliance, pointing to the insistence of the provincial town of Misrata on displaying the corpse of the former colonel, in an apparent breach of Islamic practice.
And there is international disquiet about increasingly graphic and disturbing images on the internet of abuse of a body that appears to be Gaddafi's following his capture and the fall of his hometown of Sirte on Thursday.
But the immediate reaction to Sunday's announcement was jubilation. "We declare to the whole world that we have liberated our beloved country, with its cities, villages, hilltops, mountains, deserts and skies," said an official who opened the ceremony in Benghazi, the place where the uprising erupted in February and which has been the headquarters for the NTC.
Crowds listening to Libyan music and waving the tri-colour flag cheered. Another NTC official, Salah el-Ghazal , paid tributes to all those who died, and referred to the "humiliating" death of Gaddafi. Jalil's speech is intended to set the clock ticking on a process to set up a multiparty democracy, a system Gaddafi railed against for most of his rule.