Wednesday, August 17, 2005
The rape of the past
It is a sad thing to talk to the champions of architectural heritage in Afghanistan. The archaeologists, historians and architects that I have happened to meet and talk to about the great richness of Afghanistan’s past are as different as personalities can be, but they all have an indefinable common something. A deep and weary vein of sadness vein runs through them. A distant and controlled expression of discontent lingers as they describe the things they love. And it is hard indeed not to be sad. Since the well-publicised destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in March 2001 by the Taliban, the rape of Afghan architectural and archaeology has gone on. All archaeological sites of interest are covered with unofficial excavations of casual booty-hunters. The fort of old Balkh, the Balay Hissar is pockmarked with hundreds of such scars. In the bazaar in Mazar-i Sharif you can buy Bactrian silver coins - Drachmas written in Greek script. Non-portable finds are discovered by the archaeologists, smashed for no particular reason, as was a Buddhist stupa near Balkh only days after its excavation.
In Kabul there lives a cantankerous Englishman - a curmudgeonly heroic historian and archaeological enthusiast. When I met him, he was painfully, passionately depressed about the looting and destruction of beautiful and significant things over the years. He has been in Afghanistan, on and off, since the 70s. If you prompt him, he flies into a rage of melancholy and frustration at the steady degradation and destruction eating away at Afghanistan’s architectural riches. Old buildings are being replaced by garish concrete and glass cookers in the desire, as he puts it “to dump all that is 'old' and hence nasty, dirty and not modern, in favour of pink and lurid green edifices which are like some Disney movie on LSD.” He cries of the need to “stop this holocaust before everything is swamped in a desert of concrete and marble.”
Another woeful lover - a recent returnee from Iran, and obsessive amateur scholar of his country’s past, took us round on a sightseeing trip of old Balkh last weekend, and his commentary at each site turned inevitably into an elegy for the disappeared and the disappearing. Of the Khwaja Abu Parsa mosque:
‘Last time, I was here - a month ago - this inscription could still be read. Now it is gone forever.’
(Not only that, but the ruined madrasa that faces the mosque has been turned into an extemporised public toilet, littered with human dung – the not-so-desirable relics of Balkh’s current inhabitants and visitors.)
Of the Nogombad mosque, the oldest in Afghanistan, and unique in the Islamic world:
‘Each time it rains, more of the building is washed away… 20 years ago, 2 of the nine original domes were intact – now there are none. Nobody took a photo before they were destroyed.’
Of the Takhti Pul mosque, one of the best examples in Mazar of the 19th century architecture of the time of Amanullah Khan – two beautiful biscuit-brown egg-shaped earth domes, possessed of stunning Bukharan plasterwork and painting on the interior:
‘The rain comes in the roof here – the drain pipes used to carry the water off the roof, but now it all collects and seeps down into the structure. Without protection, the roof will soon be destroyed.’
And you can see how it is difficult to attract attention for this kind of thing. Many parts of Afghanistan are still desperately poor. But still… there is something terrible about the destruction of heritage which strikes you in a different way to the terrible suffering of the present generation. When the reconstruction process has done its job, and Afghanistan is able to get by as a prosperous and self-sufficient state (inshallah) how will the Afghan people be able to position themselves in history and relate to their past and their future, if all traces of the glorious past are gone?
In Kabul there lives a cantankerous Englishman - a curmudgeonly heroic historian and archaeological enthusiast. When I met him, he was painfully, passionately depressed about the looting and destruction of beautiful and significant things over the years. He has been in Afghanistan, on and off, since the 70s. If you prompt him, he flies into a rage of melancholy and frustration at the steady degradation and destruction eating away at Afghanistan’s architectural riches. Old buildings are being replaced by garish concrete and glass cookers in the desire, as he puts it “to dump all that is 'old' and hence nasty, dirty and not modern, in favour of pink and lurid green edifices which are like some Disney movie on LSD.” He cries of the need to “stop this holocaust before everything is swamped in a desert of concrete and marble.”
Another woeful lover - a recent returnee from Iran, and obsessive amateur scholar of his country’s past, took us round on a sightseeing trip of old Balkh last weekend, and his commentary at each site turned inevitably into an elegy for the disappeared and the disappearing. Of the Khwaja Abu Parsa mosque:
‘Last time, I was here - a month ago - this inscription could still be read. Now it is gone forever.’
(Not only that, but the ruined madrasa that faces the mosque has been turned into an extemporised public toilet, littered with human dung – the not-so-desirable relics of Balkh’s current inhabitants and visitors.)
Of the Nogombad mosque, the oldest in Afghanistan, and unique in the Islamic world:
‘Each time it rains, more of the building is washed away… 20 years ago, 2 of the nine original domes were intact – now there are none. Nobody took a photo before they were destroyed.’
Of the Takhti Pul mosque, one of the best examples in Mazar of the 19th century architecture of the time of Amanullah Khan – two beautiful biscuit-brown egg-shaped earth domes, possessed of stunning Bukharan plasterwork and painting on the interior:
‘The rain comes in the roof here – the drain pipes used to carry the water off the roof, but now it all collects and seeps down into the structure. Without protection, the roof will soon be destroyed.’
And you can see how it is difficult to attract attention for this kind of thing. Many parts of Afghanistan are still desperately poor. But still… there is something terrible about the destruction of heritage which strikes you in a different way to the terrible suffering of the present generation. When the reconstruction process has done its job, and Afghanistan is able to get by as a prosperous and self-sufficient state (inshallah) how will the Afghan people be able to position themselves in history and relate to their past and their future, if all traces of the glorious past are gone?
# posted by Ed @ 5:18 pm 
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Ed, I was watching 'Restoration', a sort of Big Brother for rotting and underloved buildings, and it wrmed my cockles to see the massive response by the nation to the plight of crumbling architectural treasures, without which our heritage will be much diminished... Wanton destruction goes on in Iraq, for similar reasons to what you cite in Afgh. Afghanistan seems to be a country of lost treasures - the loss of material history is just another kind of disempowerment and is symbolic for the loss of a way of life, identity, god knows. What do we do??
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