The History Blog

Beirut’s traditional Ottoman-style mansions are being razed in favor of high rises that can be sold as having an ocean view.

People can sell these ancestral homes with their glorious oasis-like gardens to developers because there is not a single law on the books protecting properties younger than 300 years old. Evidentally there aren’t any basic zoning laws either, or else there’s no way they’d be allowed to strip the city bare of 2 and 3-story homes and replace them with 20-story towers.

The only law on the books that protects old homes in Lebanon dates back to 1933 when the country was under French mandate. It mainly protects buildings constructed before 1700 although younger buildings can be placed on the list of protected sites either by government directive or private initiative.

“The law basically focuses on the protection of archaeology and antiquities,” Culture Minister Tarek Mitri told AFP.

A survey commissioned by the government in 1997 identified about 250 buildings in Beirut that cannot be demolished.

“The list is outdated now,” Mitri said. “Plus it was done hastily. Some buildings that should be on it aren’t.”

The list is of little consolation to activists like Hallak, who say the issue is more about preserving the country’s heritage than merely saving a building or a mansion.

“It’s important to save an entire street, what we call a cluster… there is a social structure that is completely tied to these buildings,” Hallak says.

“We need a modern law that will allow us the flexibility to preserve these buildings.”

Amen, sister. Those ocean views won’t even exist once the whole town is paved with high-rise towers because they’ll obscure each others panoramas, so it’s really it’s in everyone’s interest to preserve Beirut’s distinctive architectural personality.

Besides, Beirut has been through the wringer, bombed and bullet-riddled and every other violence under the sun. How monstruous to think of its famous beauty having survived all that only to be destroyed by a real estate bubble.

A retired archaeologist in Bristol chained himself to a Victorian lamp post Tuesday, and went on a hunger strike to keep the city from digging it up and moving it to a posher part of town.

They’d already taken 17 of the cast iron lamp posts, so with only 13 left, David Cemlyn felt he had to take a stand.

‘The lamp-posts have been here for over 100 years and have been part of what makes a community, along with the red pillar boxes, the railings and the park benches,’ he said. ‘Taking them away is destroying the ambience of the area and it’s breaking down the community.

‘I’m a retired man used to working in my allotment and I’m not used to chaining myself to anything - but if I have to do it again I will do. Dozens of people have gathered offering support and drivers are beeping their horns.’

The city council claimed the hundred-year-old lamps were being replaced by modern ugly ones to help prevent crime and to comply with environmental standards, although how the poor, benighted residents of the beautiful and historic Clifton district with its endless Georgian terraces are meant to cope with the despoliation of their environment and dizzying spike in roadside crime rates inherent in the lamp posts, the council didn’t mention.

The protest worked. By the end of the day, the council suspended the lamp post looting and agreed to talk it over further with the community.

The obelisk is one of seven 80-foot high basalt monoliths erected in the Ethiopian city of Axum to celebrate their adoption of Christianity in the 4th c. A.D.

Mussolini stole it in 1937 and erected it near the Circus Maximus to celebrate his 15th anniversary in power, and although Italy signed a UN treaty in 1947 promising to return the monument, many successive Italian governments had something better to do until 2005.

But even when Italy did get around to it 50 years late, the obelisk’s return to Axum would not be an easy one. They had to cut it into three pieces and commission a specially-built cargo plane to ship them one at a time.

Then once the eagles finally landed, the Ethiopian authorities had to figure out how to put them together and restore the obelisk to its former glory as a royal grave marker without damaging the grave it marks.

Now, at long last, the moment has come. By the end of June, the obelisk should be back in its place.

In 1950, South Korean military rounded up thousands of prisoners and sometimes under the watchful eye of American military observers, shot them and buried them in ditches.

Those mass graves, long spoken of as “fiction” or leftist propaganda or else blamed on the North Korean army by US and South Korean officials, are still being uncovered today as the Korean Truth and Reconciliation Commission attempts to fulfill its brief.

The victims were supposed to be Communists working with the North Koreans, but according to a former prison guard/executioner who testified before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, they were really garden variety criminals, peasants rounded up in random sweeps, even women and children.

The mass executions — intended to keep possible southern leftists from reinforcing the northerners — were carried out over mere weeks and were largely hidden from history for a half-century. They were “the most tragic and brutal chapter of the Korean War,” said historian Kim Dong-choon, a member of a 2-year-old government commission investigating the killings.

Hundreds of sets of remains have been uncovered so far, but researchers say they are only a tiny fraction of the deaths. The commission estimates at least 100,000 people were executed, in a South Korean population of 20 million. [...]

The declassified record of U.S. documents shows an ambivalent American attitude toward the killings. American diplomats that summer urged restraint on southern officials — to no obvious effect — but a State Department cable that fall said overall commander Gen. Douglas MacArthur viewed the executions as a Korean “internal matter,” even though he controlled South Korea’s military.

Pictures of the massacres taken by a US Army major are among the documents recently declassified by the US government. I can’t find them on the National Archives website, but there are several included in the AP photo gallery.

My parents have a couple of God-knows-how-old stone walls on their property in Connecticut, and I’ve never paid them much attention except when investigating the crannies for lizards and snakes.

It turns out, though, that these historic remnants of the state’s farming past are in danger from developers and thieves of various sorts.

They sometimes come in broad daylight, with bulldozers and other heavy equipment, loading rocks from Connecticut’s old stone walls into dump trucks and carting them away to beautify another home, decorate a driveway or make a rustic entrance to a mall.

More surreptitious scavengers of stone work in the dark or slip deep into the woods, where old stone walls often exist in isolation, glimpsed only by hikers. After they pluck the most desirable ones, weathered stones covered in lichen to establish their antique pedigree, they typically leave behind a jumbled, rock-strewn mess.

In most places, salvaging or removing such stones with a landowner’s permission is lawful, but from the historical point of view, archaeologists and preservationists say, it is a crime, a theft of history. Stone walls are an important part of the landscape, delineating where settlements and farms existed, and how they operated. They tell a story about who we were — and are.

Much of the time the scavengers have the permission of the property owners who have no particular need or affection for their stacked stone treasures. Some towns have zoning ordinances that regulate the mining of stone walls, but the ones mentioned in the article are mainly about walls on or abutting public land.

Then there’s the question of the few poor laws out there being enforced. Here’s the spoiler: they aren’t.

The January raids on four California museums resulted in the arrest of art historian Roxanna Brown on Friday.

Yesterday, she died in a federal prison of an apparent heart attack.

As is routine with all inmates upon booking, Brown was given a medical screening at the prison. A spokeswoman for the detention center did not disclose the status of that screening.

By Monday, Brown was too ill to appear in court, but did appear briefly Tuesday. She had been charged with one count of wire fraud, allegedly for allowing art collectors to use her electronic signature to overstate the value of items they donated to several Southern California museums. The collectors then claimed fraudulent tax deductions, investigators said.

Brown was a vocal anti-looting advocate. Her position was that buyers of antiquities should only consider purchasing finds from well-documented official digs. Anything short of that was likely to result in buying stolen goods.

How to reconcile this highly ethical stance with the tax fraud charges, I have no idea. Now she will never have the chance to clear her name, although I’m certain the investigation will continue.

I couldn’t let the first annual National Train Day pass without comment.

May 10 was chosen as the National Train Day in commemoration of the day the last rail and the last spike — an engraved golden spike now residing in the museum — joined the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads in Promontory Point, Utah, in 1869.

I love me some trains, and in this day and age when air travel costs far more than the ticket price in discomfort, humiliation and delays, and car travel gets increasingly more prohibitive as the price of a full tank skyrockets, it’s good to see Amtrak actually wake the hell up and get some PR steam.

For some fantastic period pictures and scans of news articles published on the day, check out the Central Pacific Railroad Photographic History Museum.

On a dig five years ago, University of Calgary archaeologist Julio Mercader found 1000-year old ritual bowls in a cave in Mozambique. Instead of snagging them for his institution as usually happens when Western archaeologists excavate in Africa, Mercader decided to create a local museum, staffed with locals.

Locals are being trained in African archeology, making western and African academic research relevant to the local population.

“I’m grateful that I’m being given the chance to actually be trained,” said Mussa Raja, through a translator.

Raja is an honours student at a university in Mozambique and has been studying archeology at the U of C for the past 41/2 months.

“I’m getting the training in the actual practicality of how to excavate and do field work,” he said.

Raja, who said archeology is a new science for many African universities, has seen the attitudes of his people change when they see a fellow African doing archeological work.

“They’re so happy when it’s not just foreigners there,” said Raja.

The museum, which opens in August, will display the finds made by Mercader’s team, including Stone Age artifacts, and will also feature an interactive centre and an oral history archive.

I call that brilliant. One of the most common justifications I’ve read for western museums buying (often unprovenanced) antiquities on the (totally dirty) market is that the poor locals in their poor war-torn countries couldn’t possibly care for the artifacts as well as the big budget “universal” museums abroad do.

Mercader has now torn that argument to shreds, and he’s just one man doing the best he can. Imagine what museums and universities with endowments and hundreds of people on staff could accomplish if they made the effort to work with local people and institutions to study and display their antiquities.

Iran and Italy have signed a Memorandum of Understanding which will allow closer cooperation between Italian and Iranian archaeologists in the excavations of Burnt City.

The head of the Italian team working on Iran’s Burnt City project, Lorenzo Costantini, noted that different phases of excavations in the Burnt City have revealed the competence of people of the city in different sciences and crafts.

Located 57 km from the city of Zabol in Sistan-Baluchistan province, southeast Iran, Burnt City is one of the most important prehistoric sites in Iran which thrived during the third millennium BC.

All kinds of amazing things have been found in Burnt City, from delicately painted, 5000 year-old artificial eyeballs to the earliest known backgammon set (turquoise and agate pieces on an ebony board).

Another update on the controversy over the building of a motorway over Tara, one of Archaeology magazine’s top 10 archaeological stories of 2007.

BBC Ulster radio has an in depth documentary on the subject very much worth the 28 minutes of listening time. It puts the NPR story I linked to in my previous update to shame.

Here’s a money quote from the UK chief executive of the World Monuments Fund, Dr. Jonathan Foyle (at 12m 38s in the broadcast):

The World Monuments Fund watch list contains all sorts of endangered sites - this one actually reminds me of the Bamiyan Buddhas which were destroyed by the Taliban in 2001 against international uproar.

It was a government which decided that these monuments would be erased and cultural erasure is part of the game of war and buildings very often suffer from that.

This entire site is the equivalent of Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey for its royal associations, Canterbury for its Christian associations - all rolled into one.

And that is to be made way for, well, maybe not a radical Islamist view of God, but it is a radical view of Western consumerism as a be all and end all which must be serviced by the state.

I really that to destroy culture to shave 20 minutes off a journey time and to turn County Meath into a vast carpark is really quite a radical thing to do.

You tell ‘em, brother.

For the short version of the documentary, see this article.

For the full version, click here: Download