“Now I’ve finally come, and I see so much destruction. For communication engineering student Fares Mardini, it was the first time. Some of the Syrian tourists had visited in better days. On a recent day, a group of tourists from countries including the United Kingdom, Canada and China, and another, with Syrian university students, were wandering through the ruins. Now he is back in Palmyra, operating a restaurant, where he said he serves tourists regularly. “We thought it was impossible that foreigners would return to Palmyra,” said Qais Fathallah, who used to run a hotel there but fled to Homs when IS took over. Nevertheless, Syrian and foreign tourists have begun to trickle back. The Palmyra Museum is closed, and the much-loved lion statue that used to stand in front of it has been moved to Damascus for restoration and safekeeping. In the town adjacent to the ancient site, some shops have reopened, but signs of war remain in the form of charred vehicles and burned-out or boarded-up stores and houses. Today, the road through the desert from Homs to Palmyra is dotted with Syrian army checkpoints. The militants later destroyed Palmyra's historic temples of Bel and Baalshamin and the Arch of Triumph, viewing them as monuments to idolatry, and beheaded an elderly antiquities scholar who had dedicated his life to overseeing the ruins. IS demolished the prison after capturing the town. It was home to the Tadmur prison, where thousands of opponents of the Assad family's rule in Syria were reportedly tortured.
In more recent times, the area had darker associations. The ancient city was the capital of an Arab client state of the Roman Empire that briefly rebelled and carved out its own kingdom in the third century, led by Queen Zenobia. Without a coordinated preservation and restoration effort, said Kanjou, now a researcher at Tübingen University in Germany, "We will lose what was not destroyed by the war or the earthquake."īefore the war, Palmyra - one of Syria’s six UNESCO world heritage sites - was the country’s archaeological crown jewel, a tourist attraction that drew tens of thousands of visitors each year. Youssef Kanjou, a former director of Syria's Aleppo National Museum, said the situation of heritage sites in his country is a “disaster.” They were damaged by the war or, more recently, by the deadly 7.8-magnitude earthquake that struck a wide area of neighboring Turkey and also Syria in February. Other archaeological sites throughout Syria face similar problems, both in areas held by the government and by the opposition. PALMYRA, Syria (AP) - At the height of the Islamic State group's rampage across Syria, the world watched in horror as the militants blew up an iconic arch and temple in the country’s famed Roman ruins in Palmyra.Įight years later, IS has lost its hold but restoration work on the site has been held up by security issues, leftover IS land mines and lack of funding.
0 kommentar(er)
