Should we celebrate a replica of the destroyed Palmyra Arch?

A reconstructed version of the arch IS destroyed was recently erected in Trafalgar Square — but ought we to rebuild ancient sites or leave ruins to remind us of our cruel history?
A replica of the Triumphal Arch at Palmyra is unveiled at Trafalgar Square
Getty
Robert Bevan24 May 2016

This month, a spectacular stone arch was unveiled in Trafalgar Square by Boris Johnson. For two days only Londoners were able to see a replica of the Triumphal Arch from Palmyra, one of the monuments Islamic State (IS) deliberately destroyed while it held the Syrian world heritage site.

As a symbolic statement of resistance to those who wish to pulverise the collective heritage of humanity it sends a strong message — we will rebuild.

Except rebuilding monuments after violent destruction is not as easy as that. It raises profound questions not just about authenticity and copies but of the use we make of architectural history.

The arch was built by Oxford’s Institute of Digital Archaeology (IDA). It has deployed advanced photographic techniques to create a 3D digital model of the monument and then build it out of Egyptian sandstone that has been laser-cut in a Tuscan quarry. It will be re-erected in Dubai and New York before, says the IDA, “heading home” to Palmyra this September.

For Roger Michel, the IDA’s executive director: “By rebuilding these structures, we rebuild not only our own national histories but our connections to each other as well.” Some archaeologists are wary about the expensive publicity stunt, others, led by a former employee of the Syrian antiquities directorate who fled the country, have organised an online petition condemning the original destruction but also calling on the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (Unesco) not to rebuild Palmyra hastily, as its director general announced immediately in the wake of the shifting front line.

These critics of Unesco have called the pledge “inopportune and unrealistic” in the midst of an ongoing war and warn of rewarding President Assad and Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and ignoring their own human rights abuses. One prominent conservationist has privately praised the Russians for avoiding the bombing of Palmyra’s archaeological site.

This forgets their killing of civilians in the modern city nearby and the damage caused to historic sites by indiscriminate Russian bombing elsewhere in Syria. Separating the fate of people and places never helps protect culture in the long run. Unesco’s support for rebuilding marks a change of approach for an organisation charged with safeguarding world culture.

When the Bamiyan Buddhas were dynamited by the Taliban in 2001, Unesco was clear that rebuilding the statues from the pulverised rubble was not an option — the reconstruction would be a fake even if it used fragments of the original material reconstituted with silicon. Better that the Buddhas’ empty niches stand as a memorial to the horrors of wanton destruction, it was argued.

This perspective reflects longestablished conservation practice about the need for authenticity in the restoration of historic buildings, as set out in the Charter of Venice since 1964 and reaffirmed vigorously in the 1994 Nara Document on Authenticity at an international gathering of conservation experts held during the Bosnian conflict.

The copy of Palmyra’s Arch of Triumph is assembled in Trafalgar Square
Leon Neal/AFP/Getty

Yet Unesco has since funded the rebuilding of a facsimile shrine in Timbuktu destroyed by Islamist terrorists and is now proposing a similar response at Palmyra.

It matters that our history is “real”. Even if well intentioned, erecting Italiancut Egyptian stone in the middle of Syria is about as far from authentic as you can get. The arch will not be “heading home” as the IDA claims.

There are now myriad digital projects internationally to scan threatened monuments with the idea of enabling the reconstruction of those that have been lost.

Many of these ventures are overlapping and unco-ordinated, wasting limited heritage resources. Some are sympathetic and useful; others appear more about building institutional reputations.

These complicated issues will be touched upon in an upcoming installation at the Venice Architecture Biennale by the Victoria & Albert Museum called A World of Fragile Parts. Its curator Brendan Cormier points out that this concern with authenticity has, however, changed over time.

In 1867 the museum’s first director, Henry Cole, formulated the International Convention of Promoting Universally Reproductions of Works of Art for several nations to swap fine copies of important works. Copies were seen as about spreading knowledge. That attitude changed in the following century, with museums and Western societies later deriding even academic facsimiles.

The V&A is asking if in 2017 — 150 years after the original — the convention should be rewritten for the 21st century in the wake of attitudes to replicas changing once more. I n the 20th century there were many rebuilding efforts following wartime destruction — including the heroic recreation of central Warsaw, deliberately flattened by the Nazis in their genocidal campaign against Slavic culture.

The meticulous copies of Warsaw’s streets and squares have been decried in some quarters as “Disneyfication” but were an attempt by the Poles to rescue their history and identity from oblivion. What’s not much remembered is that some of the material for rebuilding Warsaw came from the Silesian town of Breslau (now Polish Wrocław) which, after Poland was liberated, was ethnically cleansed of its long-standing German population and had many of its Germanic monuments taken down.

Equally, distinguished author WG Sebald was highly critical of post-war Germany’s reconstruction programme in which cities such as Munich were largely rebuilt as if nothing had ever happened. He called it: “a reconstruction tantamount to a second liquidation… of the nation’s own past history [that] prohibited any looking backwards”.

Blaming “Hitler’s war” for the destruction of Munich and in so doing casting themselves as victims, Munich’s citizens distanced themselves from the recent past. Nazi buildings could be condemned and historic buildings restored in toto. Likewise, Mostar’s bridge — symbolically destroyed to divide Bosnian communities in the city during fighting — may have been just as symbolically rebuilt but the city’s neighbourhoods and schools remain worryingly divided along ethnic lines today.

Rebuilding — whether by perpetrators or their victims — can then serve to mask the genuine, if unpalatable, past; erasing the gaps, the voids, the ruination that bears witness to traumatic events. It can conceal the reality of the present.

But, as in Warsaw, and perhaps in Syria and Iraq where cultural destruction is ineluctably linked to IS’s attempts to erase other ethnic and religious traditions, to argue against rebuilding at all would be a counsel of despair and a victory for the destroyers. There are no easy answers but where possible, “critical reconstruction” remains the most honest course of action.

Selfie zone: tourists have been drawn to Trafalgar Square by the replica Palmyra arch
Lauren Hurley/PA Wire

This is where the cracks and fissures and layers of experience are incorporated as memories into the rebuilt fabric of a monument. An exemplar of this approach is the Neues Museum in Berlin by David Chipperfield Architects, where layers of wartime damage have been incorporated into a contemporary rebuilding of its shell.

It is too early to say if “critical reconstruction” is an appropriate approach at Palmyra but shipping an Italian/Egyptian copy of an arch to Syria that does not incorporate either original material or reveal in its design something of the trauma of the attack upon it simply cannot be right.

Restoring architecture can, of course, never in itself lay to rest conflicts but the danger of erecting pre-conflict perfect copies is that the recognition of guilt or the expiation upon which reconciliation depends can be hindered if there is no visible, material memory of the original crimes.

Ultimately, if we fake our history how can we learn from it?

The Destruction of Memory, a featurelength documentary based on Robert Bevan’s book of the same name will be previewed in London in June. A second edition of the book has just been published.

A previous version of the article reported that the unveiling date of the arch was announced on the same day that President Bashar al-Assad’s Syrian government drove IS out of Palmyra in March. We have been informed by the Institute of Digital Archaeology that it had in fact announced the unveiling date two months earlier, in January.

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