Destruction of Chogha Zanbil and the Basket Budget
According to Iran Gate, 63-year-old Shahriar Adl stands on the same carpet on which his mother gave birth to him, saying, ‘Gentlemen, they didn’t even cover my travel expenses to register Chogha Zanbil on the UNESCO World Heritage list. I had to go to Egypt at my own expense to get this monument registered in 1979.’
Shahriar Adl descends from the royal chamber of his registered house in the Shemiran district, saying, ‘The gentlemen and scholars said if a monument from Iran is registered with UNESCO, anti-revolutionaries will enter the country.’ Now, Shahriar Adl rests in the Namdaran section of Behesht-e Zahra cemetery, unable to see how the bricks of a monument he painstakingly registered with UNESCO are being looted.
The story of the looting of Chogha Zanbil’s bricks was first reported by Mojtaba Gheestoni, a journalist and cultural heritage activist. Gheestoni says, ‘A while ago, I saw signs of brick and inscription destruction at the Chogha Zanbil ziggurat, but when I inquired, the officials always justified it and never gave a clear answer.’ Gheestoni says many inscriptions are missing and have been stolen.
These stolen inscriptions were written by Untash Napirisha, an Elamite king, 1250 years BC. Napirisha built this ziggurat for Inshushinak, the god of Susa. In the inscriptions, now hidden in some unknown corner, he wrote that he hoped this structure would be accepted by Inshushinak.
It seems Inshushinak protected this structure even from Ashurbanipal, the plundering Assyrian king. The ziggurat was not yet completed when Ashurbanipal attacked it, burying it under a mound of earth. But does Inshushinak still have the power to protect this monument against the cruelty of an ideological government? Therefore, it is uncertain whether the Chogha Zanbil ziggurat, the best-preserved ziggurat in the world, can survive our times.
The survival of historical monuments depends on many factors. Protecting them requires the presence of guards and a budget for their restoration and maintenance. Gheestoni warned since 2017 that the Chogha Zanbil protection unit does not even have a simple motorcycle to reach their mission area in emergencies. That same year, the staff of the Chogha Zanbil World Heritage site went on strike, demanding attention to their unpaid wages.
Now, years later, not only has the issue of paying the staff of national and world heritage sites not been resolved, but we are also witnessing the destruction and theft of these monuments. Chogha Zanbil, the first Iranian monument registered on the UNESCO World Heritage list, is maintained by just one protection unit officer. The first globally registered Iranian monument, spanning 600 hectares, has neither a guard for protection nor a fence to demarcate the area.
Gheestoni says, ‘I’m sorry that some are trying to deny this news while they know the truth. If I reveal the whole truth, it might lead to a few people losing their jobs, but I have no such intention.’
This journalist believes the December reports of the Chogha Zanbil complex provide evidence consistent with theft and destruction of the monument. But the question is, what actions have the officials in the Cultural Heritage Department taken since becoming aware of this issue? How many personnel have they added to the protection unit? None. Why wasn’t there coordination with the police for their deployment in the complex after this incident?
If we look into the news about heritage in the past month to trace the roots of the theft and destruction of Chogha Zanbil, at the top, we will see the destruction of the historical fabric of Shiraz and then the demolition of Qajar houses in Isfahan. Some of the demolished historical houses in these cities are not registered on the country’s cultural heritage list because there isn’t enough budget to register them, a problem other historical buildings also suffer from.
The publication of the 2023 budget bill figures in the field of cultural heritage, tourism, and handicrafts also indicates this neglect of historical monuments. Although the budget for this sector has increased by 13% compared to last year, reaching 31,291 billion tomans, this budget has drawn a lot of criticism, even from Ali Darabi, the deputy minister of cultural heritage.
Darabi wrote in a note that only 35% of last year’s budget was allocated to this ministry, and now, even if the entire predicted budget for this year is allocated, the Cultural Heritage Deputy still won’t be able to do much.
