experts race to preserve Afghanistan’s ancient Buddhist heritage site Mes Aynak from copper mining

The Taliban have backed an 18-month-long conservation undertaking to safeguard the Afghan heritage web site of Mes Aynak, a 2,000-year-old Buddhist metropolis that’s prone to destruction from a long-delayed mining undertaking.

Situated round 40km southeast of Kabul within the province of Logar, Mes Aynak is regarded as residence to the second largest untapped copper mine on the earth, with deposits price an estimated $100bn. In 2008, Afghanistan’s authorities below then-president Hamid Karzai signed a profitable contract with a Chinese language firm to extract its riches by way of an open-pit copper mine.

The event, which can destroy the traditional metropolis and all its buried secrets and techniques, was delayed to permit for additional archaeological research and the relocation of the location’s useful artefacts. With the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan in August 2021, fears grew that the brand new administration might forestall rescue efforts and press forward with the mining operations. Nevertheless, the brand new authorities has confused its intention to protect the location’s archaeological stays.

Now, as a part of a $1m undertaking funded by the Swiss basis Aliph, the Aga Khan Belief for Tradition (AKTC) has begun works to revive and restore short-term buildings that defend greater than 50 websites containing archaeological stays at Mes Aynak, together with stupas, statues, wall and ground work.

These buildings had been “erected way back to 2010” and plenty of have “been deformed below the burden of snow and different environmental components”, Ajmal Maiwandi, the chief government of AKTC Afghanistan, tells The Artwork Newspaper. The undertaking is meant to consolidate and substitute them with steady protecting buildings.

The undertaking may even embrace growing and executing a conservation plan for the traditional stays and a trial run to relocate a number of artefacts to a close-by web site.

A panel of worldwide specialists will quickly be deployed to Mes Aynak, Maiwandi says. “When the conservation plan is in place we’re going to consolidate as lots of the artefacts as attainable within the 12 months that we have now left.” A cataloguing course of will establish and prioritise essentially the most vital gadgets.

Afghanistan’s ministry of data and tradition confirmed that works to safeguard the location’s cultural heritage have commenced and that the Taliban authorities is dedicated to preserving its artefacts.

“The Mes Aynak mine is of financial and cultural worth to Afghans. The ministry of data and tradition is in search of to make sure that its financial advantages attain Afghans and its cultural and historic treasures stay secure,” says Atiqullah Azizi, Afghanistan’s deputy minister of tradition and humanities in a video recording supplied to The Artwork Newspaper. He additionally known as for cooperation with the worldwide neighborhood in defending the nation’s historic monuments.

Maiwandi says the brand new conservation undertaking at Mes Aynak is pressing as a result of “with out figuring out precisely when mining operations might start, we have to act quick”.

Excavations in the course of the 15-year hiatus in improvement have additionally uncovered many artefacts that had been beforehand protected by the earth. “The opposite urgency is to cease the decay and by extension the additional destruction of the artefacts by way of nature and development of time,” Maiwandi provides.

Aliph, a worldwide fund devoted to the safety and rehabilitation of cultural heritage in battle and post-conflict areas and presently one among solely a handful of funders supporting cultural heritage tasks in Afghanistan, says it stays dedicated to saving Afghanistan’s cultural heritage and to discovering the very best resolution to protect Mes Aynak.

“Mes Aynak has been described as one of the vital essential archaeological finds of the final 4 a long time within the area. The archaeological web site contains quite a few Buddhist monasteries with stupas, sculptures, wall work, Zoroastrian temples, and traces of business exercise relationship to Late Antiquity,” says Sandra Bialystok, Aliph’s director of communications and partnerships.

The Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001 “was one of many driving causes that Aliph was based within the first place”, Bialystok provides. “The varied cultural heritage of Afghanistan is a treasure of Afghan folks and likewise a part of the widespread heritage of humanity, so its safety is crucial.”

The conservation undertaking is predicted to supply much-needed employment for 350 folks in Afghanistan together with labourers, architects, engineers, archaeologists and technical employees at a time when the nation is experiencing one of many worst humanitarian crises on the earth.

Maiwandi hints that in time the undertaking might be prolonged to rescue extra artefacts. “There are different websites that should be excavated and extra archaeology that should occur,” he says. “That’s maybe a section two and even a section three of this undertaking. For us preserving heritage at this web site is a vital side of preserving Afghan cultural patrimony, the principle purpose that we’re concerned within the undertaking.”