Cultural heritage has fallen under the threat of being of damaged and/or erased due to armed conflicts, and destruction has increasingly become a major part of daily news all over the world. The destruction of cultural heritage has escalated in Syria as the ongoing armed conflict has spread to World Heritage Sites, such as Palmyra and the old city of Aleppo. The devastation of Syria’s war has deliberately and systematically targeted archaeological monuments dating from the prehistoric, Byzantine, Roman, and Islamic periods, with no distinction being made of the cultural, historical, and socio-economic significance of such sites. The violence of this conflict is not, of course, limited to the destruction of cultural property, and has first and foremost served to introduce non-state radical actors, such as Daesh, who targeted local people, archaeological site, museum staff and facilities.
The destruction and re-purposing of monuments in Syria, such as Daesh’s attempts to turn churches into mosques, are heavy-handed attempts to re-write history by erasing physical evidence. In this paper, I explore the semantics of continuous attempts to reconstruct cultural heritage sites, destroyed by Daesh, during the ongoing war, and how the destruction and reconstruction of Syria’s heritage have been deployed to serve political agendas.
Since the beginning of the armed conflicts and public uprisings that accompanied and followed the ‘Arab Spring’ that started in 2010, cultural heritage sites have been hit hard, damaged and often destroyed by different perpetrators. The Syrian Civil War has resulted in unprecedented damage to cultural heritage sites, monuments, and facilities. This has provoked observers, politicians, and international and national non‐government organizations to debate about the impacts of damaging Syria’s ‘irreplaceable’ patrimony and how to safeguard its past from the ongoing destructive actions. This paper investigates the transformation of the terminology of heritage—and the uses of heritage—in Syria before and during the ongoing conflict, and how the internationally renowned term ‘heritage’ emerged to promote the destruction of Syria’s cultural patrimony. This paper explores the semantics and impacts of the continuous destruction and the ongoing reconstruction plans on the cultural heritage of Syria. To conclude, I argue that those destructive actions started a process of ‘heritagizing’ the present which will eventually become a part of the Syrian collective memory.
It is predominantly known that history is written by winners. However, this statement is true when a conflict has a symmetric tendency. In the case of Syria, where the conflict has been widely considered asymmetric, history is being written by a regime/government that won the war by not losing it. This article investigates the interconnection between heritage and politics in Syria by scrutinizing heritage practices, uses, and abuses since the colonial period. First, this article examines regime/government-led post-conflict reconstruction projects in the aftermath of Syria’s current conflict. Then the article moves on and explores the creation of war narratives and the selective memorialization of Syria’s recent conflict by looking at the portrayal of contested war memories in the media and the production of oral history. I argue that heritage practices, uses, presentation, and promotion in Syria since the colonial period have produced a politicized, one-sided (hi)story influenced by political agendas. This history includes highly politicized, ongoing tangible and intangible heritage reconstruction works, freighted with cultural meaning and primarily intended to bolster the power and authority of the ruling regime.
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