USCBS News

Afghan archaeological treasures thousands of years old are to go on display in Kabul after being rescued from smugglers passing through British airports.

By Ben Farmer in Kabul.

Last Updated: 5:44PM BST 22 Apr 2009.

More than 3,000 antiquities have been returned to Afghanistan after being confiscated by British customs officers and identified by the British Museum.

Situated at the crossroads of Asia and washed by centuries of trade, migration and invasion, Afghanistan has one of the richest archaeological heritages in the world.

The country has played host to invaders from Alexander the Great, to the Arab armies of the seventh century and Ghengis Khan in 1220.

Alexander spent approximately three years in what is now modern-day Afghanistan after invading in 330BC and several Afghan cities claim to have been founded by his armies.

However treasure hunters and looters have taken advantage of three decades of war and civil chaos to dig up and steal large numbers of antiquities.

As main hubs for flights from the Gulf and Pakistan, many have then passed through Heathrow and Gatwick and been spotted by customs officials.

Omara Khan Masoudi, general director of museums at the Kabul National Museum, said half the repatriated artefacts dated from before the Islamic period which began more than 1,300 years go.

He said: “Unfortunately in the past two or three decades of war, the central government was not able to control Afghanistan’s illegal excavations. It is still a big problem for us.” The national museum itself was repeatedly looted by the Mujaheddin during the civil war of the 1990s and exhibits were damaged by rocket attacks.

In 2001, Taliban fighters smashed many of the museum’s pre- Islamic Buddhist figures that they considered idolatrous.

While none of the three and a half tonnes of artefacts found by customs are thought to have been taken from the museum, curators hope they could begin to restock the ransacked Islamic and Bronze Age collections.

Staff are currently unpacking the crates and the best specimens for will go on display at the museum on the outskirts of the Afghan capital later this year.

Among the most important finds are several 4,000-year-old Bactrian stone artefacts believed to have been looted from northern Afghanistan.

Metal basins and candlesticks and a peacock-shaped brazier from the Ghaznavid empire of the 10th to 12th century are said to be in excellent condition. More recent treasures include a carved, wooden pen box filled with handwritten Persian poems and curses dating back more than a century.

Mr Masoudi said a further 4,000 artefacts had been sent back to the museum after being found in Denmark in 2007.

The British-found artefacts were flown back to Afghanistan with the help of the British Red Cross.

A spokeswoman for the British embassy in Kabul said: “We are delighted that so many people came together to make the significant joint effort necessary to return these pieces of Afghanistan’s history to the Afghan people.

“Afghanistan’s cultural heritage reflects a particularly vivid history and is especially rich.

“It is unacceptable for anyone to deprive Afghans of their heritage and, for its part, the UK will do all that it can to support the Afghan Government and people in preventing this sort of criminal profiteering.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/afghanistan/5201198/Looted-Afghan-treasure-to-go-on-show.html

New York Times

April 11, 2009

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

L’AQUILA, Italy — Nadia Gabrielli and her sister, Giuliana, dragged suitcases over the rubble of what remained of L’Aquila. The earthquake early on Monday morning devastated this city of about 68,000 in the Abruzzo region of central Italy. Nearly 300 were killed in the area, and some 28,000 people forced into tent villages and other temporary shelters. Save for a few like the Gabriellis, desperate to retrieve belongings, only stray dogs and rescue workers now wander this city’s empty streets, picking through debris.

Anxiously, the two women asked for help fetching medicine from an apartment in a building that had cracked like a hard-boiled egg, a gaping horizontal fissure running straight through the second-story windows and balcony. Afterward the sisters lamented what had happened to their beloved “city of culture,” as Nadia Gabrielli put it.

In the aftermath, tending to the injured and the dead comes first. But local residents as well as teams of officials have already begun to assess the cultural damage. The earthquake 12 years ago that ravaged Umbria wasn’t nearly as severe but it made headlines abroad because it damaged tourist sites like the famous basilica in Assisi. Less glamorous, Abruzzo is rich in its own heritage, which is priceless to the people here.

“I lived in Latin America and South America for many years,” Nadia Gabrielli added, “but I came back here because this is my city, my culture. It’s our identity.”

Italy is not like America. Art isn’t reduced here to a litany of obscene auction prices or lamentations over the bursting bubble of shameless excess. It’s a matter of daily life, linking home and history. Italians don’t visit museums much, truth be told, because they already live in them and can’t live without them. The art world might retrieve a useful lesson from the rubble.

Italy’s prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, has been busily soliciting foreign aid for cultural restoration after the quake. More than 11,000 volunteers and rescue workers have rushed to help. Milko Morichetti is one, a 39-year-old art restorer from Mogliano, in the Italian Marches.

“Without the culture that connects us to our territory, we lose our identity,” he said. “There may not be many famous artists or famous monuments here, but before anything, Italians feel proud of the culture that comes from their own towns, their own regions. And when we restore a church or a museum, it gives us hope. This is not just about preserving museum culture. For us, it’s about a return to normalcy.”

It’s also normal, alas, that nothing happened after a recent report, yet another by the Italian authorities, about the need to seismically retrofit countless Italian monuments and churches. The effort was clearly too much in every sense for Italians to bear.

But so is what happened last week. Before then, Santa Maria di Paganica was a lovely parish church in L’Aquila. Built in the 14th century, like many buildings here it collapsed in the earthquake of 1703, then rose again. Today plaster dust blows skyward on gusts of wind through where the church’s ceiling once was. The dome has collapsed. Chunks of its frescoes, like meat in a butcher shop, dangle from the remains of the cupola, gently swaying in the breeze.

The Church of Santa Maria del Suffragio in the Piazza del Duomo, an 18th-century gem by Carlo Buratti, is now in shambles. An aftershock sent what remained of its dome, by Giuseppe Valadier, tumbling. Someone had leaned a tall, thin wood cross on the bronze doors of the hulking Duomo, an unlovely pile on the same square; but just north, in the Piazza del Palazzo, an ancient statue of the Roman historian Sallust presides over a lovely bed of pansies.

City Hall in the piazza wasn’t faring as well. Its stone bell tower, bearing a bronze testament to the workers of L’Aquila, “The Knights of Humanity,” showed cracks along the base. A plaque carved with the names of benefactors of a local orphanage, the first dating back to 1542, lay shattered like peanut brittle in a heap opposite a palace where colorful stuffed animals smiled from behind a toy-store window on the ground floor arcade. The palace roof has fallen in.

In Sicilian towns like Belice, Salemi and Poggioreale, where an earthquake struck in 1968, seismic safety became an excuse to abandon historic centers for what the art critic Vittorio Sgarbi, the mayor of tiny Salemi, has described as “urban suburbs.” He wrote in an appeal to Mr. Berlusconi in the newspaper Il Giornale the other day that when L’Aquila is rebuilt, its cultural heritage must be restored: “With wounded places, destroyed towns, and families who have lost their homes, you cannot also take away their memory.”

He’s right, and not just about L’Aquila. In Paganica, a few miles away, a half-dozen people died in the quake. The Church of Santa Maria della Concezione, marking the main square, now has cannonball-size holes. Narrow streets snake uphill from there toward Santa Maria del Presepe, also called the Madonna della Castello. Its stoic facade had boasted a handsome rose window. Birds fly in and out now.

Along the side of the church facing the snowy Apennines, rubble blocked the path. The other side overlooked a pretty meadow. Erected in 1605, the church outlasted the earthquake of 1703. But today its two large bells barely hang from the crumbling bell tower, a pathetic sight. A Paganica resident wept over the bells on Italian television.

In L’Aquila, Giovanni Berti de Marinis, 24, stood in the sunshine and eerie silence photographing a mountain of debris that made a barricade of what had been his street. It seemed heartless to ask him about lost culture, but he offered anyway.

His voice trembling, he said: “It’s upsetting that people understand how beautiful L’Aquila is only when it’s destroyed.”

It is.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/11/arts/11abroad.html?ref=design

http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/04/10/arts/20090411-abroad-slideshow_index.html

Telegraph.co.uk

6 April 2009

L’Aquila has lost a handful of eccelestical treasures in the overnight earthquake, including the renowned church of San Bernardino di Siena.

Much of the town was destroyed by an earthquake in 1703 but the San Bernardino di Siena’s Renaissance façade designed by Nicolò Filotesio survived in its 15th century form.

The unique façade boasts three column sections in doric, ionic and corynthian styles. This is views as a perfect expression of the fashionable ideal of a perfect fusion of Greek and Latin form with Christianity. The Baroque interior of the church was rebuilt after the 1703 earthquake. At 96m long it is divided into three ailes that join under the Dome.

The mausoleum of St. Bernardine is viewed as Abruzzi’s greatest Renaissance sculpture by Silvestro dell’Aquila, a pupil of Donatello’s

The town also boasted a massive fortress, Forte Spagnolo, which was built by a former Spanish Viceroy and is now hhome to the National Museum of Abruzzo.

The current facade of the Duomo, which traces its origins to the 13th century, dates from the 1800s.

Near the town is the church of S. Maria di Collemaggio, also had a Romanesque façade in red and white marble. The outstanding feature is intricately decorated portals, each has a rose-window above.

Inside the church is a mausoleum of Pope Celestine V erected in 1517.

Private collections thought lost are in the Palazzi Dragonetti and Persichetti.

Two famous fountains are the Fontana delle novantanove cannelle, a fountain with ninety-nine jets distributed along three walls, constructed in 1272.

The Luminous Fountain, a well-known city landmark is a sculpture of two women bearing large jars, built in the 1930s.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/5113291/Abruzzo-church-treasures-lost.html

Associated Press

By MARTA FALCONI – April 6, 2009

L’AQUILA, Italy (AP) — A powerful earthquake in mountainous central Italy knocked down whole blocks of buildings early Monday as residents slept, killing more than 70 people in the country’s deadliest quake in nearly three decades. Tens of thousands were homeless and 1,500 were injured.

Ambulances screamed through the medieval city L’Aquila as firefighters with dogs and a crane worked feverishly to reach people trapped in fallen buildings, including a dormitory where half a dozen university students were believed still inside.

Outside the half-collapsed building, tearful young people huddled together, wrapped in blankets, some still in their slippers after being roused from sleep by the quake. Dozens managed to escape as the dorm walls fell around them but hours after the quake, a body of a male student was pulled from the rubble.

“We managed to come down with other students but we had to sneak through a hole in the stairs as the whole floor came down,” said student Luigi Alfonsi, 22. “I was in bed — it was like it would never end as I heard pieces of the building collapse around me.”

“There was water gushing out of broken water pipes, and the corridor which led to the stairs was partially blocked when a piece of the wall came down,” Alfonsi, his eyes filling with tears and his hands trembling, told The Associated Press.

The quake has also taken a severe toll on the city’s prized architectural heritage. L’Aquila was built as a mountain stronghold during the Middle Ages and has many prized Romanesque, Gothic and Renaissance buildings.

Parts of many of the ancient churches and castles in and around the city have collapsed. Centuries-old churches in many isolated villages in the area are believed partly collapsed, and damage to ancient monuments has been reported as far as Rome.

L’Aquila, capital of the Abruzzo region, was near the epicenter about 70 miles (110 kilometers) northeast of Rome. It is a quake-prone region that has had at least nine smaller jolts since the beginning of April. The quake struck at 3:32 a.m. The U.S. Geological Survey said the big quake was magnitude 6.3, but Italy’s National Institute of Geophysics put it at 5.8 and more than a dozen aftershocks followed.

More than 70 people were killed and the death toll was likely to rise, civil protection chief Guido Bertolaso said as rescue crews clawed through the debris of fallen homes. Some 1,500 people were injured.

The quake hit 26 towns and cities around L’Aquila, which lies in a valley surrounded by the Apennine mountains. Castelnuovo, a hamlet of about 300 people 15 miles (25 kilometers) southeast of L’Aquila, appeared hard hit, and five were confirmed dead there. Another small town, Onno, was almost leveled.

“A few houses have remained standing, but just a few,” Stefania Pezzopane, provincial president of L’Aquila, told Corriere della Sera. Rescue workers in Onna, population about 250, said the town was virtually deserted as survivors sought shelter elsewhere.

L’Aquila Mayor Massimo Cialente said about 100,000 people were homeless. It was not clear if the mayor’s estimate included surrounding towns. Some 10,000 to 15,000 buildings were either damaged or destroyed, officials said.

Premier Silvio Berlusconi declared a state of emergency, freeing up federal funds to deal with the disaster, and canceled a visit to Russia so he could deal with the quake crisis.

Condolences poured in from around the world, including from President Barack Obama, Pope Benedict XVI and Abdullah Gul, president of quake-prone Turkey.

Slabs of walls, twisted steel supports, furniture and wire fences were strewn about the streets of L’Aquila, and gray dust carpeted sidewalks, cars and residents.

Residents and rescue workers hauled away debris from collapsed buildings by hand or in an assembly lines, passing buckets. Firefighters pulled a woman covered in dust from the debris of her four-story home. Rescue crews demanded quiet as they listened for signs of life from other people believed still trapped inside.

Elsewhere, a man dressed only in his underwear wept as he was pulled from the debris and embraced.

A body lay on the sidewalk, covered by a white sheet.

Parts of L’Aquila’s main hospital were evacuated because they were at risk of collapse, and only two operating rooms were in use. Bloodied victims waited in hospital hallways or in the courtyard and many were being treated in the open. A field hospital was being set up.

In the dusty streets, as aftershocks rumbled through, residents hugged one another, prayed quietly or frantically tried to call relatives. Residents covered in dust pushed carts full of clothes and blankets that they had thrown together before fleeing their homes.

“We left as soon as we felt the first tremors,” said Antonio D’Ostilio, 22, as he stood on a street in L’Aquila with a huge suitcase piled with clothes. “We woke up all of a sudden and we immediately ran downstairs in our pajamas.”

Evacuees converged on an athletics field on the outskirts of L’Aquila where a makeshift tent camp was being set up. Civil protection officials distributed bread and water to people who lay on the grass next to heaps of their belongings.

“It’s a catastrophe and an immense shock,” said resident Renato Di Stefano, who was moving with his family to the camp as a precaution. “It’s struck in the heart of the city, we will never forget the pain.”

The Culture Ministry said a wall of the 13th century Santa Maria di Collemaggio church collapsed and the bell tower of the Renaissance San Bernadino church also fell. The 16th castle housing the Abruzzo National Museum was damaged.

This was Italy’s deadliest quake since Nov. 23, 1980, when one measuring 6.9-magnitude hit southern regions, leveling villages and causing some 3,000 deaths.

Many modern structures in Italy over recent decades have failed to hold up to the rigors of quakes along Italy’s mountainous spine, or in coastal cities like Naples. Despite warnings by geologists and architects, some of these buildings have not been retrofitted in terms of seismic safety.

Pezzopane, the provincial president, said residents may have been lulled into complacency because so many smaller quakes had jolted the area, including two or three earlier in the night.

“Considering what happened, a bit more concern, more attention might have saved lives,” she said.

National officials insisted no quake can ever be predicted and that no evacuation could have been ordered on the basis of the recent jolts.

“There is no possibility of making any predictions on earthquakes. This is a fact in the world’s scientific community,” Civil protection chief Guido Bertolaso told reporters.

The last major quake to hit central Italy was a 5.4-magnitude temblor that struck the south-central Molise region on Oct. 31, 2002, killing 28 people, including 27 children who died when their school collapsed.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jkcWIUobzfe0DCXm1fJn_Xfj_QpgD97D2ALO3

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

April 2, 2009

BAGHDAD (AFP) — Iraq will reopen ancient Ur, the Biblical birthplace of Abraham, to the public after the US military hands back the archaeological site next month, the government said on Wednesday.

“The transfer from US forces of Ur in Dhi Qar province is on May 13. On this occasion, we will hold a ceremony and then rehabilitate the place and open it to visitors,” a tourism and antiquities ministry spokesman said.

The ancient site, which lies next to the US air base of Talila outside the southern city of Nasiriyah, has been closed to the public since the US-led invasion of 2003.

The ancient city, which dates back to 6000 BC, lies on a former course of the Euphrates, one of the two great rivers of Iraq, and is one of the country’s oldest sites.

It is renowned for its well preserved stepped platform or ziggurat, which dates back to the third millennium BC.

Ur of the Chaldees was one of the great urban centres of the Sumerian civilisation of ancient southern Iraq and remained an important city until its conquest by Alexander the Great a few centuries before Christ.

After the invasion, the US military also took control of the site of ancient Babylon, returning it to Iraqi control only in December 2006.

Archaeologists heavily criticised Washington for its failure to do more to protect that site, near Hilla south of Baghdad, the location of the famed Hanging Gardens, one of the wonders of the ancient world.

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5gyQFG3mejbeejKJYY8wOBELgIu5A