The 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck Nepal on April 25 created a severe humanitarian crisis and devastated cultural resources and heritage in the Himalayan country. The earthquake left over 7,000 people dead and destroyed almost 200,000 houses, while many hundreds of thousands more were damaged. Thirteen out of the seventy-five districts in the country were severely impacted.
Today, the focus is on saving human lives and providing food, housing, and medical care. Nepalese authorities requested emergency search and rescue teams to close down operations on May 4, but international humanitarian support will be needed for many months to assist the millions of people affected by the earthquake.
Restoring the monuments that are key to Nepal’s spiritual life will be a major task for the future. The many hundreds of Hindu and Buddhist temples and shrines that dot the Kathmandu Valley are the focal point of urban and village communities. These are above all places of worship where the Nepalese honor their gods and goddesses, but they are also places where villagers or urban communities to come together to exchange news, market goods and produce, or draw water. Restoring these spiritual centers will be key to rebuilding Nepalese communities.
Unesco’s World Heritage List identifies seven groups of monuments that exemplify Nepal’s artistic achievement and historical importance: the Durbar Squares of Hanuman Dhoka (Kathmandu), Patan and Bhaktapur, the Buddhist stupas of Swayambhu and Bauddhanath and the Hindu temples of Pashupati and Changu Narayan. The first three were reported to have been almost completely destroyed in a preliminary assessment issued by UNESCO just days after the earthquake. The report also drew attention to significant damage to natural heritage at Sagarmatha National Park, which includes Mount Everest. UNESCO announced on May 7 that it plans to send an international mission to do damage assessment and to advise on protections and conservation of Nepalese monuments.
Organizations like the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust have made long term commitments to preserving and rebuilding Nepalese temples and historic buildings. The Trust has deep roots in Nepal, having restored more than fifty historic buildings over the last twenty years. training and working with traditional artisans and artists. The Patan Square was a particular focus of the Trust’s preservation work, involving the restoration and conservation of 2 major palace courtyards, 3 tiered temples, a number of public buildings and a large urban garden. In the past, the Trust performed numerous strengthening projects at Kathmandu Darbar specifically directed to improving resistance to seismic events on building which had been damaged in a major earthquake in 1934. The destruction from the catastrophic 7.8 magnitude quake of April 25 may demand even more rigorous seismic standards for future rebuilding or traditional reconstruction.
Nepal has become a popular venue for new forms of heritage tourism through groups such as Restoration Works International, in which international visitors have contributed labor and funds to rebuild the monastic community at Chhairo Gompa in Lower Mustang in new quarters. Local stonemasons and carpenters do the construction work, but visitors can assist by cleaning statues, plastering, repainting murals and other tasks.
Although most earthquake relief is organized through large charitable entities, small scale restoration projects have been set up in villages by foreigners with close ties to Nepalese communities. (For example, two reconstruction projects have been started by Santa Fe, NM families; one in Halcok village and the other in Chupar, with donations funneled through the nonprofit plenty.org. Contact plenty.org or info@committeeforculturalpolicy.org to ask about donations to other small scale relief efforts through plenty.org.)
The damage to cultural heritage in Nepal as a result of the earthquake shows how important it is to build inventories and document historic buildings and their contents. The Arches program – developed by the Getty Conservation Institute along with the World Monuments Fund – is a software system that allows data to be collected and stored in a single location and include detailed GIS data, satellite imagery, photographs and laser scans, and historical details and records. In earthquake devastated Nepal, Arches has collected information on damaged buildings by using drones to gather aerial video and data when access by ground teams is not possible. (The city of Los Angeles, another earthquake prone region, has done an extensive city-wide survey using Arches in order, among other uses, to have a digital record of its intact state.)
In 2011, a more limited precursor to Arches called the Middle Eastern Geodatabase for Antiquities (MEGA) was developed by the Jordanian Department of Antiquities, the Getty Conservation Institute, and the World Monuments Fund. This program utilized satellite imagery to track destruction of monuments in Iraq, Jordan, and other regions at high risk for war damage or looting. The project included development of a bilingual Arabic-English, Web-based national geospatial information system for Jordan. Because of the detailed information available from satellite imagery, such a system has the capacity to locate not only changes to the landscape, but even tire tracks indicating the presence of looters at a site.
Most of the people involved with Nepalese art, museum curators, scholars, collectors and art dealers, have deep ties to Nepal and its culture. There is enormous goodwill and willingness to help in this tragic situation. Objects that disappear in the chaos can be found if they have been documented. Objects that have been destroyed can at least be replicated. A concerted effort by the international art community to build and maintain access to records could be more useful by far in situations of political unrest or natural disaster than haphazard, after the fact, interdiction efforts.
Source : committeeforculturalpolicy.org
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