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 monuments. Vandalism is a perennial and ubiquitous phenomenon, although possibly cherished by particular cultures and encouraged in particular eras. The 1960s, for instance, was everywhere a difficult decade for historic buildings, when, for example, with a nasty symmetry, two of the greatest monuments of the railway age--the Euston Arch in London and Pennsylvania Station in New York--were demolished. Both fell victim to ignorance and stupidity, reinforced by the obsession with style and image characteristic of that neophiliac decade--underpinned by commercial greed.

At least when historic buildings fall victim to property 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 bombs or shells hit military targets. At least the damage to ancient monuments and looting of museums that has occurred during the recent thuggery in Iraq would seem 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 so particularly loathsome, and frightening--barbaric acts such 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 structure was being used as an observation post by the French army. But all nations seem capable of such wickedness--a wickedness that diminishes the perpetrator and damages not just the enemy but humanity, and posterity, as well. During the next world war, 'Bomber' Harris deliberately targeted the historic cities of Lubeck and Rostock for the RAF as they were full of old timber houses that would burn well--and they did. Furious at this apparently gratuitous attack on German culture, Hitler ordered the retaliatory 'Baedeker' raids on Canterbury, Exeter, Bath and Norwich. The loss was Europe's.

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

Not that the targeting of cultural monuments on ideological grounds was peculiar to the destructive twentieth century. 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 never tolerate the shrines of infidels, so ancient Orthodox churches are destroyed in Kosovo, and mosques in Serbia. More intelligent missionaries try to incorporate older beliefs into the new religion, so Christian churches were very often built on the sites of pagan shrines, just as the Ottomans made Hagia Sophia into a mosque. Even this, however, can lead to conflict and destruction--as in Ayodhya in India, where in 1992 the sixteenth-century Babri Mosque was violently attacked and demolished by Hindu nationalists because it was believed to have been built on the site of a Hindu temple. 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 true in Israel, where Jewish, Christian and Islamic claims can and do compete. 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 every single carved image in the exquisite Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral. But 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 rock 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 rood screens and stained-glass windows. Similar destruction went on during the religious wars in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Fig. 1). In the nineteenth century, Pietists in Norway burned some of the celebrated ancient stave churches as their grotesque timber carvings were, again, considered idolatrous. All of which might also suggest that minimalist modernism is another manifestation of religious fundamentalism.

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