Source: The Conversation – France – By Parsa Ghasemi, Archaeologist, Postdoctoral research fellow at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and research member at ARSCAN Nanterre, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
131 sites and museums have suffered damage or been destroyed during the US and Israeli war against Iran between February 28 and April 8. Amid uncertainty over what will happen next as peace talks failed during the two-week conditional ceasefire, it is an opportune time to take stock of the state of Iranian cultural heritage.
With its vast territory and strategic position in West Asia, Iran has long been one of the principal centres of human activity and cultural development.
As one of the world’s oldest centres of civilisation, Iran has preserved an exceptionally rich archaeological and historical landscape shaped over several millennia. This heritage reflects a long sequence of cultural traditions, from the Palaeolithic (prehistoric) times through the Elamite kingdom (2700 BCE and 539 BCE), the Median dynasty (c. 700 to 550 BCE), the Achaemenid (559 to 330 BCE), the Parthian (247 BCE to 224 CE) and Sasanian (224 to 651 CE) empires and into the Islamic periods.
This continuity is visible in the country’s archaeological sites, historic cities, monuments, and museum collections. It is estimated that Iran contains several hundred thousand archaeological sites, although only a small proportion have been formally registered on the national heritage list since the beginnings of state heritage protection in the early twentieth century.
The international significance of this heritage is underscored by the inscription of 29 Iranian properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List, comprising 27 cultural and two natural sites. Last month, the UN cultural agency weighed in, voicing concern over the protection of Iran’s national treasures and sites of “cultural significance”, such as the Qajar-era Golestan Palace, following airstrikes. In a recent statement, the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) condemned any destruction – whether intentional or incidental – of cultural and natural heritage, deploring the “serious implications for cultural continuity” and the “risk of irreversible loss”, more broadly across the region as a result of the conflict.
What’s the damage?
An emerging official inventory of cultural damage recorded by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Tourism and Handicrafts of Iran shows that more than 131 archaeological sites, museums, and historical monuments (Figure 1.) in Iran have been damaged across 17 provinces and 26 cities.
The highest concentration of damage has been recorded in Tehran, where 61 sites were affected. It should be noted, however, that these figures are based on city-level assessment and do not include archaeological sites situated outside urban areas. In addition, historic urban fabrics are listed separately. The inventory recorded up to March 29 reveals a grave and highly uneven impact on Iran’s heritage, with destruction concentrated in some of the country’s most important historic and monument-rich cities.
The 1954 Hague Convention states that damage to any nation’s cultural property is a loss to the heritage of all humanity, which is why it requires international protection. Protecting cultural heritage is also tied to protecting human rights, including cultural rights, identity, memory, and human dignity.
As a result, intentional attacks on cultural heritage during armed conflict are not only morally unacceptable they could also violate international law and constitute war crimes, as confirmed by the International Criminal Court in the Al Mahdi case. This protection is further strengthened by UN Security Council Resolution 2347 of 2017, which emphasises the importance of safeguarding cultural heritage in conflict situations.
Tehran and Isfahan: the worst hit
What emerges from the inventory is not a scattered pattern of isolated incidents. It is a concentrated “geography of damage”, falling most heavily on provinces that hold some of Iran’s richest cultural assets, above all Tehran and Isfahan.
These are not marginal places in the historical map of Iran. They are among the country’s principal repositories of architectural memory, museum collections, 15th to 19th-century royal compounds, religious monuments, and civic heritage.
The most significantly damaged monuments in Tehran include Golestan Palace, Tehran’s Historic Arg, the Historic Grand Bazaar of Tehran, Marble Palace, the Historic Shahrbani Building, the Former Senate Building, Sepahsalar Mosque, and the Farahabad Palace Museum.
In Isfahan Province, damage has been reported at the Naqsh-e Jahan Square complex, the Chehel Sotoun Palace, the Abbasi Friday Mosque, etc.
The provincial distribution is among the most revealing aspects of the inventory. Tehran alone accounts for 61 counted sites, representing 46.6 percent of the total. Isfahan follows with 23 sites, or 17.6 percent. Together, these two provinces contain 84 damaged entries, equivalent to 64.1 percent of the inventory. When Khuzestan and Kurdistan are added, the top four provinces account for 108 sites, or 82.4 percent of all counted entries.
This means the damage pattern is not spatially even. It is clustered in provinces, where museums, palace complexes, historic neighbourhoods, old institutions or schools, and monumental architecture are densely concentrated.
The hypothesis of a strategically targeted assault
The typological profile of the damaged heritage is equally telling. The largest single group consists of historical houses, mansions, and residences totalling 33 entries. These are followed by civic and institutional buildings, such as schools, with 16 entries, and famous historical mosques, with 12.
The inventory also identifies historical forts, mills, and baths (hammam). The report additionally records 10 palaces or royal complex entries dating back to the 15th-19th centuries CE, indicating that the damage reaches deeply into architectural forms associated with old districts of the war-affected cities.
The document states that 50 museum units refer to museum components embedded within larger complexes, palace compounds, and multi-part heritage sites.
The cultural loss is therefore both architectural and institutional, affecting not only structures but also the curatorial and interpretive frameworks housed within them. According to Science, cultural institutions are taking measures to protect its moveable heritage, including boxing up museum items for safekeeping and installing the Blue Shield logo designed to indicate protected heritage on more than 100 cultural monuments.
The source also names 7 historic urban fabrics separately, suggesting that the true scope of impact extends beyond single monuments to wider urban heritage zones across Tehran, Isfahan, Sanandaj, Kermanshah, Qom, Khansar, and Tabriz. Old parts of the cities function as “layered cultural organisms”.
When an urban fabric is damaged, what is threatened is not only a set of buildings, but a continuity of streets, spatial memory, social practice, and architectural identity and art. Some of these fabrics were used for several hundred years and are a testimony of old traditions, artefact production, and Persian culture and identity.
If future surveys and analyses of Iranian sites are carried out, we will see that many sites outside the urban centres have been damaged. This damage has not been limited to buildings and museums, but has also affected archives of ancient manuscripts held in collections and places of worship such as mosques, churches and synagogues.
The bombing of the Cultural Heritage Office in Khorramabad city makes the deliberate nature of this destruction even clearer. These intentional acts of destruction are not limited to cultural heritage, but also extend to essential infrastructure, such as the unfinished Bridge in Karaj, the Pasteur Institute, and universities such as Shahid-Beheshti, Sharif and Elm-o Sanat (Science and technology).
What is dangerous here, as we see, is a portrait of cultural loss at multiple scales, from individual structures to complex heritage environments.
The chronological range of the damaged sites is striking. It extends from Kuh-e Khawaja in Sistan, one of south-eastern Iran’s most important archaeological sites, with remains dating to the Parthian, Sasanian, and early Islamic periods, to Siraf in Bushehr, the famous late antiquity and early medieval port city on the Persian Gulf, and to the tomb of Baba Taher in Hamedan, the celebrated 11th-century Persian poet.
The damage was not confined to historical monuments alone, but also reached the modern building of the Iranian Cultural Heritage office.
The targeting of cultural heritage in Iran, the historical memory and enduring identity of one of the world’s longest-lasting civilisations and an irreplaceable part of the heritage of humanity, was not incidental but systematic. Such acts must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
They represent an assault not only on monuments, museums, and archaeological sites, but also on the cultural legacy, historical consciousness, and collective memory of humanity itself.
The right to remedy and the law on war reparations
Under international law, the law of reparations for war damage stipulates that a State responsible for an internationally wrongful act must make full reparation for any damage, whether material or moral.
This destruction must never be repeated. Urgent and immediate measures are now required to ensure the protection, documentation, stabilisation, and restoration of Iran’s damaged heritage.
These efforts must be undertaken without delay and supported at international level through coordinated action by cultural institutions, professional bodies, and relevant global organisations.
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Parsa Ghasemi ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d’une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n’a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.
– ref. When war comes for Iran’s cultural heritage – https://theconversation.com/when-war-comes-for-irans-cultural-heritage-280335
