In a situation of life and death during wartime, it might sound superfluous that concern for Ukraine’s cultural heritage has also become newsworthy since its invasion by Russia on the 24th of February 2022. The Ukrainians themselves are risking their lives to safeguard cultural objects by transporting movable objects and artworks to safer areas and safeguarding immovable objects such as statues by covering them with sandbags. Ukraine has a long and illustrious history and as a result also a rich legacy of cultural heritage which, given the severity of the invasion, is near on impossible to safeguard.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has reported that they are monitoring the situation, but it is more than just a mere concern for the physical properties of the heritage components. Ukraine is home to seven World Heritage Sites namely St Sophia Cathedral & Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra dating to the 11th century, Lviv Historic Centre Ensemble, Struve Geodetic Arc, Virgin Beech Forests of the Carpathians, Residence of Bukovinian and Dalmatian Metropolitans, Wooden churches of the Carpathian Region, and Chersonese. To date, none of the seven has been damaged by the Russian missiles, but several museums, libraries, statues, churches, and so forth, have been destroyed. The Ukrainians accuse the Russians of deliberately destroying their cultural heritage, while the Russians call it collateral damage.
It was only in 1907 that cultural heritage became a topic of international law, and since 1950 UNESCO and other intergovernmental organisations have developed a series of international treaties and texts to protect it. The first of these was UNESCO’s 1954 Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property (referred to as the “Hague Convention”), developed in part in response to the destruction and looting of monuments and works of art during World War II. Its genesis was in the belief that preventing their destruction or deterioration was important for the future of the emerging international world order and for preventing conflicts.
But why is cultural heritage important and why in particular are the Ukrainians so passionate about preserving their own that they are willing to risk their lives to save and safeguard it? Our cultural legacy is one-of-a-kind and priceless. Cultural objects are tangible witnesses to the past, revealing our genuine history and preserving our recollections of it. Cultural legacy evokes strong feelings such as identity, consciousness, and a sense of communal belonging.
It took a long time for the world to accept that cultural property belongs to “all mankind” regardless of where it comes from. According to UNESCO, its disappearance is “a harmful impoverishment of the heritage of all the nations of the world.”
Deliberate destruction of cultural heritage during warfare is a way to destroy and overtake a society by erasing its memory and this is exactly what Ukrainians are accusing Russia of doing. In an interview by NBC News, Ukraine’s former vice minister of culture, Iryna Podolyak, said “They just want to erase from the map Ukraine – our heritage, our history, our identity and Ukraine as an independent state”.
A picture that was taken on March 27, 2022, shows a view of the Menorah memorial, set on the place of a mass killing of Jewish people by Nazis during WWII, a day after it was damaged in a Russian shelling, at the entrance of the Drobitsky Yar Holocaust memorial complex on the eastern outskirts of Kharkiv.
UNESCO is keeping a close eye on the development of the war. On 21 September 2022 they verified that 192 sites have been damaged since 24 February. This includes 81 religious sites, 13 museums, 37 historic buildings dedicated to cultural activities, 17 monuments, and 10 libraries, but none of the seven World Heritage Sites have been harmed to date.
In the interim SUCHO (Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online) – a project led by more than 1,500 foreign volunteers with the goal of digitizing and preserving Ukrainian cultural treasures – is working round the clock to identify and archive material from Ukrainian cultural institutions by employing a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and its content to safeguard it for future generations.
According to UNESCO the deliberate destruction of Ukraine’s cultural heritage during the current invasion by Russia could be considered a war crime, but what punishment would ever be just enough to compensate a country for the loss of an important part of its national identity?
Figure 1: Kyiv St Sophia’s Cathedral, Ukraine. (Photo credit: Rbrechko – Wikimedia CC BY-SA 4.0)
Figure 2: The monument to the Duke of Richelieu in Odessa, Ukraine being sandbagged to protect it from the Russian invasion of Ukraine (Photo credit: https://odessa-life.od.ua/news/odessity-zashhitili-djuka-ot-bombezhki)
Figure 3: The damaged menorah monument at the entrance of the Drobitsky Yar Holocaust memorial complex, Kharkiv. (Photo credit: Sergey Bobok/AFP Getty Images)
References:
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