Tens of thousands of people thronged Tripoli's Green Square -- now renamed Martyrs' Square -- early Saturday to fete their new-found freedom after 42 years of Muammar Gaddafi's rule.
Arriving on buses, in cars and on foot, ecstatic residents of the coastal capital repeated a single phrase over and over again: "Now we are free."
There were women in traditional Islamic robes or sporting colourful headscarves. Some young women wore ballgowns while other youths strutted around in the latest fashions.
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"Do you feel how the air we breathe is pure?" said Manal Al-Deber, a 35-year-old pilot.
"We have dreamt of this moment for the past 42 years and now it has become a reality. Today, I no longer dream. Our future is brilliant."
There were no signs of commiseration for Gaddafi, who repeatedly in recent months used broadcasts to insist he was loved by his people and to decry the anti-regime movement as a Western plot.
"Gaddafi has said that the people love him. The people of Tripoli want to show him how they love the revolution," said Jamal Mansur, a 50-year-old who fought to topple the regime.
Others commented how freely people behaved, in stark contrast to earlier times when Gaddafi's network of spies and informants had stifled free speech.
"The people have changed. Earlier they were wary, their faces were horrible," said Ahmed Tarsin, a 34-year-old.
"They spent their time asking you who you were and what you wanted. Today they are magnificent and beaming," he added.
The milling crowds, who created traffic jams along the Corniche leading to the central Martyrs' Square in the heart of the city -- an area where Gaddafi lived -- cried: "Libyans, lift up your heads, you are free!"
Others held up the black, green and red flag of the revolution to chants of "God is Greatest" -- a rallying cry of the fighters who spearheaded the campaign to unseat Gaddafi.
They also raised US and French flags to show their gratitude for the NATO-led military intervention while mocking Gaddafi by wearing curly wigs.
"We will win or we will die" and "Libya is one and united", read their banners.
Interim interior and security minister Ahmed Darrad said in Tripoli on Friday that fighters from elsewhere who had helped to liberate the capital should now go home.
"Starting Saturday there will be a large number of security personnel and policemen who will go back to work," he told AFP. "Now the revolutionaries of Tripoli are able to protect their own city."
The demand aims at defusing possible tensions between Tripoli's freshly emerged revolutionaries and the scores of hardened fighters who poured in from other towns to topple Gaddafi's regime.
Flags of the revolution fluttered everywhere, including on pick-up trucks mounted with cannon. And young demonstrators danced to the beat of tambourines.
Gaddafi, who would have marked the anniversary of the 1969 coup that brought him to power on Thursday, is a fugitive but shows no sign of capitulating.
"If they want a long battle, let it be long. If Libya burns, who will be able to govern it? Let it burn," he said in the first of two statements broadcast on friendly television channels.
"The aim is to kill the enemy wherever he may be, whether he be Libyan or foreign," he said in a relatively calm tone in his second message.
His foes say Gaddafi and his son Seif al-Islam may be in Bani Walid, southeast of the capital and still held by loyalist troops, where some clashes have taken place.
