Under the vandals' hammer: the wilful destruction of historic monuments does not belong to a barbaric, bygone era. In Saudi Arabia, historic sites are being deliberately razed by religious fundamentalists

The Vandals were far from unique in their attitude to architectural remembrancers Vandalism is a perennial and ubiquitous phenomenon, although possibly cherished by dint of particular cultures and encouraged in particular eras. The 1960 for instance, was everywhere a difficult decade for historic buildings, when, for example, with a nasty shapeliness two of the greatest memorials of the railway age--the Euston Arch in London and Pennsylvania Station in fresh York--were demolished. Both fell victim to ignorance and stupidity, reinforced by the agency of the obsession with style and image characteristic of that neophiliac decade--underpinned through commercial greed.

At least when historic buildings fall victim to attribute developers, the motive is comprehensible, if unattractive. Similarly, the destruction of historic buildings and cities in wartime is sometimes inevitable, if desperately sad. Not all bomb or shells hit military targets. At least the damage to ancient memorials and looting of museums that has occurr during the new thuggery in Iraq would look to be a product of carelessness rather than design, inexcusable as it may have been.

Nationalist and religious destruction

It is the deliberate destruction of buildings of cultural significance that is for a like reason particularly loathsome, and frightening--barbaric acts of the like kind as the burning of the library at Louvain and the shelling of Rheims Cathedral during World War I, for instance, although in the latter case the Germans insisted the medieval conformation was being used as an observation pillar by the French army. on the other hand all nations seem capable of similar wickedness--a wickedness that diminishes the perpetrator and damages not just the enemy on the other hand humanity, and posterity, as well. During the nearest world war, 'Bomber' Harris deliberately targeted the historic cities of Lubeck and Rostock for the RAF as they were replete of old timber houses that would consume well--and they did. Furious at this apparently gratuitous attack upon German culture, Hitler ordered the retaliatory 'Baedeker' raids upon Canterbury, Exeter, Bath and Norwich. The los was Europe's.

The positive, inspiring side to wartime barbarism is the efforts made to restore, or level recreate, historic structures damaged in the fighting. remembrancers matter. The centre of Warsaw was rebuilt from rubble after 1945 and, as is well known, the Russians spared no cost in restoring the royal palaces damaged (often deliberately) during the Siege of Leningrad. (How shaming that, in Britain, wartime destruction was with equal reason often used as an excuse to redevelop rather than repair historic cities, of the like kind as Exeter and Canterbury.) More freshly the historic arched bridge in the middle of Mostar, deliberately destroyed during the conflict in Bosnia, has been rebuilt--ideally as a sign of peace and reconciliation.

Not that the targeting of cultural testimonials on ideological grounds was peculiar to the destructive twentieth hundred It has always been a feature of religious as well as of nationalist conflict--as the case of the Mostar bridge confirms. Religious zealots can not ever tolerate the shrines of infidels, in like manner ancient Orthodox churches are razeed in Kosovo, and mosques in Serbia. More intelligent missionaries prove to incorporate older beliefs into the fresh religion, so Christian churches were actual often built on the sites of pagan shrines, just as the Ottomans made Hagia Sophia into a mahometan temple Even this, however, can lead to conflict and destruction--as in Ayodhya in India, where in 1992 the sixteenth-century Babri mahometan temple was violently attacked and demolished through Hindu nationalists because it was believed to have been built upon the site of a Hindu fane Archaeology, therefore, can become a cultural weapon rather than the objective search for historical evidence, as the discoveries can reinforce territorial claims. This is particularly actual in Israel, where Jewish, Christian and Islamic claims can and do strive It is all very depressing.

Religious fanaticism is no respecter of age or beauty. It is, perhaps, difficult in the West now to understand the mentality of those who smashed the heads of each single carved image in the exquisite Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral. on the other hand it would be perfectly comprehensible, of course, to the Islamic fundamentalists of the Taliban who blew up the ancient giant figures of the Buddha carved into the stone at Bamiyan (Fig. 3) because they regarded representing the human figure as idolatry. Then there was William Dowsing, the official iconoclast who went around East Anglia ordering the destruction of forty square rods screens and stained-glass windows. Similar destruction went upon during the religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Fig. 1) In the nineteenth hundred Pietists in Norway burned a certain quantity of of the celebrated ancient stave churches as their strange timber carvings were, again, considered idolatrous. All of which might also remind of that minimalist modernism is another manifestation of religious fundamentalism.

[FIGURE 1 and 3 OMITTED]