Monuments and Cities Destroyed in Wars and Conflicts: Heart-breaking Tales of Lost Heritage
Surviving For Centuries And Demolished In One Day
Images of some ruins get imprinted in our minds as children. The most prominent among them could be the half-destroyed dome of Hiroshima. For me, this monument embodied the cruellest of all deaths, that is, by the fire mushroom that we see in a nuclear explosion.
This building- skeleton also reminded me of the defeat of Hitler and the fall of Nazism. Strangely enough, this interplay of politics, history, and human emotions crafts one’s mental geography of this building.
As I grew up, this image also evolved to symbolise war, nuclear threat, and human tragedy. My mind had learned to make the topic broader and abstract. The French philosopher Guiles Deleuze has theorised how the visual imagery of post-World War II was impacted by the ruins of war - demolished and abandoned buildings and the scars on the civilisation.
Syria is the cradle of our civilisation, and Palmyra, one of its trading hubs of ancient times, as it lies just along the Silk Road used by Romans, Arabs, Persians, Mongols, Egyptians, Turks, and many other African, Asian and European people to take goods from one continent to another. In 2013, ISIS wrecked this city in a devastating attack and left nothing but rubbles of this architectural marvel. The fighting resulted in ISIS taking control of large areas of Iraq and Syria.
The Temple of Bel in Palmyra, the abode of pagan gods of the 1st century CE, was more than 2000 years old and a well-known tourist attraction. This Greco-Roman monument cluster, marked by Persian artisanship, was blown to dust in 2015. These monuments are not the same as the dome of Hiroshima. They were destroyed by war, while the dome was, in a sense, a symbol created by war.
The crisscrossing paths of the Silk Road across the Taklamakan desert, the Hindu Kush mountains, and the Mediterranean were confluence streams of goods, ideas, scholars, politics, innovations, and history in motion. Palmyra was a pivotal township of this confluence of cultures. Iraq and Syria were also home to one of the earliest civilisations in history, the Mesopotamian.
Even before Mesopotamia, this was the living ground of the Neanderthals, and the still-unravelling history of this region dates back to 80000 BCE. When ISIS arrived, many archaeologists were still studying this region to get a better insight into human evolution, and one prominent scientist among them was Khaled-al-Asaad, a Syrian archaeologist.
In 2015, this 82-year-old veteran scholar was beheaded by ISIS for not revealing to them the location of the artefacts removed for safekeeping just before the war broke out. They hung his mutilated and headless body from a column in Palmyra. The sacrifice of this great man saved some if not all, invaluable gems of history from being destroyed. His brutal death was a reminder of the inimitable cost of war. Both the image of his body hanging from a column and the picture of the destruction of Palmyra leave one shocked because we are a civilisation that values its history and its truth-seekers.
Faith Can Be Fatal; Ideologies Can Destroy the World
ISIS itself released a video of how they blasted this city into debris and dust. The Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra also met with the same fate. The terrorist group attacked and looted the Mosul Museum of Iraq. They believed that by destroying the monuments belonging to the early period of Islam, they were rebelling against idol worship and protecting a pure kind of Islam as interpreted by them. All this religious fanaticism did not stop them from looting the invaluable artefacts from these monuments and selling them in the black market to make money and fight the so-called holy war.
Aleppo was another historic place in Syria, remembered as the “Vienna of the Middle East”. It lies in a strategic trading position, equal in proximity to the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates River. It is one of the cities in history, continuously dwelled upon by humans for centuries and beyond.
What remains of these places are videos and photographs that would evoke a strong sense of loss in the minds of even a disinterested onlooker. Because the end of these places came after as many as 5000 years, for which they never once ceased to exist. In these places, a multicultural human population has thrived, without a break, at least for the last 5000 years.
The collective human mind works in many curious ways. Mass hysteria is capable of bringing out the worst in us. Religious and political ideologies can often shroud and deny their purpose of origin and make people act in diametrically opposite ways to the original ideas and concepts.
The Spanish Inquisition showed that people could practice unspeakable cruelties upon fellow human beings in the name of Christianity, a religion originating from the words of Jesus, the personification of kindness and tolerance. The war on terror eventually revealed to us the shameful and saddening pictures of ‘collateral damage’ and ‘Guantanamo’. In Afghanistan, by the time the Taliban destroyed the ancient Bamiyan Buddha statues, they had silenced all the voices of gender equality and democracy. They had enslaved the entire female folk of the country into an existence of domestic slavery.
Ancient Library of Alexandria
The ancient library of Alexandria was one of the earliest known demolitions caused by war. The Egyptian king, Ptolemy I, and his advisor, Demetrius of Phaleron, oversaw the establishment of the ancient library of Alexandria in the 4th century BCE. For generations, the Ptolemy kings collected books for this library, buying, borrowing, copying and even forging rare manuscripts. It was a twin library, one part being called the royal library and the other the daughter library. The library had about half a million books stored in it.
When Julius Caesar came to Alexandria to help Cleopatra fight her brother, Ptolemy XIII, he set fire to the enemy’s fleet. The fire spread and destroyed the royal library. In 391 BCE, the Roman Emperor Theodosius I entrusted Theophilus, the bishop of Alexandria, to destroy all the pagan monuments and temples of the city. This marked the end of the library's remaining manuscript collection, kept inside a temple complex.
The Bamiyan Buddhas
Bamiyan in Afghanistan, along the Hindu Kush mountains, was home to the world’s tallest Buddha statues. The Bamiyan Buddhas were blown up using bombs by the Taliban in 2001 as they were fighting to establish their version of Islamic rule in Afghanistan.
These statues were from the 6th century CE. The celebrated Chinese traveller Xuanzang, introduced Bamiyan to the world as a teeming hub of Buddhism and gave a vivid picture of the place as an abode of thousands of Buddhist monks. The Buddha statues were a unique mix of Roman, Indian (Gupta period), and ancient Iranian architecture.
Before organised religions took root, every city and every monument was a crucible of cultures, a vase holding these cultures in a beautiful bouquet of many narratives. This is the shared culture we must inherit, irrespective of which region or religion we belong to.
These ruined cities have more resilience than we humans have. They have seen many conquerors and many wars. They have been through the test of fire and blood many times and will rise again. However, the loss of the monuments that defined them would create many knowledge gaps in our understanding of history and in our ability to cope in the future.
The Dome of Hiroshima
Hiroshima and Nagasaki
When the Allied Forces attacked Japan’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki using atom bombs in World War II, about 200,000 people died instantaneously. Thousands more met with gradual death due to radiation exposure. Hiroshima also became a funeral ground of about 60000 of its 90000 buildings.
The Genbaku Dome partially survived the bombing in Hiroshima. Preserved in its burnt state, it is designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site. London, Berlin, Tokyo, and Atlanta also faced a similar fate, though far less devastating, at different times during the war. Many of these cities have preserved parts of their war ruins to remind us of history and the costs of war.
Arab forces destroyed the Georgian capital, Armazi, in 713 CE. The city was so ravaged that it was abandoned. In 1221, Genghis Khan destroyed the Red City of Afghanistan. Entire cities have also been preserved as war memorials. Belchite in Spain and Oradour-sur-Glane in France are examples. After being destroyed by Hitler’s army, Warsaw was rebuilt the same way as it looked before the destruction. These are the many ways we, as a civilisation, try to heal ourselves.
References
Where are the World’s Most War-Damaged Cities? By Adrian Mourby, The Guardian, 2015.
Here are the Ancient Sites ISIS Has Damaged and Destroyed. By Andrew Curry, nationalgeographic.com. 2015.
Library of Alexandria, encyclopedia.com
Palmyra’s Temple of Bel Destroyed, Says UN, bbc.com, 2015.
The Man Who Helped Blow Up the Bamiyan Buddhas. By Nazir Behsad and Daud Quarizadah. bbc.com, 2015.
Explained: The Legacy and Return of the Bamiyan Buddhas, virtually. By Benita Fernando. indianexpress.com, 2021.
Beheaded Syrian Scholar Refused to Lead ISIS to Hidden Palmyra Antiquities. By Kareem Shaheen. The Guardian. 2015.
Aleppo, britannica.com.
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