An expert on the East said that sculptures and statues in this country “already resemble cheese with a lot of holes.”
On August 15, the Taliban Islamist movement (included in the list of organizations recognized as terrorist in Russia, its activities are prohibited) announced that Afghanistan was completely under its control. And the next day, the 16th, a Taliban spokesman assured that “Buddhist sites in Afghanistan are not at risk.” MK learned what is happening in Afghanistan with the historical legacy of the past decades and what the situation is now.
Concern over the country’s cultural heritage stems from a 20-year-old precedent when the Taliban blew up two rock-hewn Buddha statues in Bamiyan province, believed to be the world’s tallest sculptures of a deity. However, even if the Taliban’s barbarity towards archaeological sites is now dispensed with, cultural monuments will still not be envied.
20 years ago, this story shocked the world. The statues carved into the rock in the Afghan Bamiyan Valley in the 6th century were not destroyed by the Taliban in a fit of aggression, it was a deliberate and laborious act of vandalism. First, the terrorists fired at the monuments with artillery weapons, and then they brought in engineers so as not to leave a stone unturned after themselves. The founder of the Taliban, Mullah Omar, issued a decree “In the framework of the fight against idolatry” to destroy all sculptures in Afghanistan. In Islam, the image of God in an anthropomorphic image, to put it mildly, is not welcomed, and the struggle with the culture of the past was laid on a religious basis. But many are convinced that there is pure politics behind the religious rationale: we can do whatever we want on our land. A few years later, another organization recognized as terrorist in Russia, IS, put the destruction of cultural monuments on stream, and the systematic “war on history” began to resemble a planned campaign.
It is rather difficult for the world cultural community to keep track of what is happening with the historical heritage of Afghanistan: for the last half century, archaeological excavations have been carried out there rarely for obvious reasons. However, interest in ancient culture is not fading away, and Afghan monuments regularly surface on the black market.
“The territory of Afghanistan is of great interest for archeology,” says MK, a specialist in archeology and art history of Central Asia, ex-director of the Roerich Museum, who now heads the State Museum of Art named after I.V. Savitsky in Uzbekistan Tigran Mkrtychev. – It was a place where the most diverse cultural traditions of the East and West met. Afghanistan was at the center of the Silk Road. The greatest empires of antiquity existed on the territory of Afghanistan, from which a large number of various archaeological sites remained. In this respect, Afghanistan has always been seen as a Klondike. Archaeological study of the country’s territory began in the middle of the 19th century. In the twentieth century, the leadership in archaeological research in Afghanistan passed to the French. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Soviets joined the French archaeologists. For some time, Viktor Sarianidi, Irina Kruglikova, Boris Litvinsky and a number of other figures worked there. Sarianidi discovered the famous Bactrian gold, which is a unique phenomenon of the combination of Hellenistic and nomadic art.
The discovery of Bactrian gold in 1978, mentioned by an art historian, has become one of the most expensive and largest treasures on the planet. She put the name Victor Sarianidi on a par with Heinrich Schliemann, who discovered Troy, and Howard Carter, who found the tomb of Tutankhamun. In total, about 20 thousand gold objects were found, dating back to the border of our era. And in 1992, the Taliban came to power and tried to find the treasure, but to no avail. Viktor Sarianidi then said that in order to preserve the gold, a fairy tale was invented for the Taliban: “They say, there were five people and five keys, all these five people went to the world, and safes with gold can be opened only when all five come together …”. The treasures were indeed hidden, but not in the place where the Taliban thought. Gold was discovered only in the early 2000s – in the basement of the presidential palace.
“It’s a pity that the Bactrian gold discovered by our archaeologist was never shown in Russia,” Mkrtychev continues. – There were exhibitions in London and New York, I saw him in America. It is now in the Kabul Museum. The civil war was a big shock to the archeology of Afghanistan. At this time, no excavations were carried out. Then the Bactrian gold was considered lost, later it was found unharmed. When there was a relative calm after 2011, excavations were resumed. In particular, they dug a monument to Mes Ainak, which is located on the territory of an ancient mine. Chinese mining companies donated money to study this monument. The research yielded a huge amount of material, so extensive that an additional storage facility had to be built in the Kabul Museum. The continuation of archaeological work in Afghanistan is of great interest. And of course, archaeological sites are in danger, because the locals have been engaged in predatory excavations for many years. And the finds are sold to the black market.
– How big is the underground market for ancient Afghan art, can you imagine?
– It’s hard to say something for sure. But I communicate with many foreign colleagues, they confirm that a lot is emerging on the black market. In general, if we look at modern photographs of archaeological sites, we will see that they resemble cheese with a lot of holes. People drip on ancient sites on their own in the hope of finding something of value. It’s hard to say what will happen next. But it is good if the government that came to power is going to preserve cultural monuments regardless of confessional affiliation. This is a big step that shows the desire for a civilized position. And then we’ll see …
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