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Cultural heritage is being destroyed by Russian forces in Ukraine. Residents armed with new technology are trying to save it
Ukraine’s cultural heritage sites are being recognised as the second casualty of Russia’s invasion. A new project is using 3D technology to digitally preserve them and archive Ukraine’s collective memory.
Published 4 June 2022 10:12am
By Jennifer Scherer
Source: SBS
Image: Three statues in Ukraine.
Key Points
- Residents of Ukraine are using 3D technology to record cultural artefacts
- As of 30 May, UNESCO has verified damage to 139 cultural sites since the Russian invasion began
Mariupol was once a growing cultural mecca of Ukraine, a flourishing port city on the north coast of the Sea of Azov.
On 24 February, thunderous rounds of fire began to suffocate the city, as Russian forces moved in under the orders of their president, Vladimir Putin.
For almost three months, the residents of Mariupol endured relentless assault and shelling, before the Ukrainian resistance fell.
Now, the city is in ruins, with reportedly thousands of lives lost, infrastructure destroyed and supply chains non-existent.
Mariupol’s Kuindzhi Museum was reduced to rubble in an airstrike, leaving precious paintings by the 19th century landscape painter it was named after, Arkhip Kuindzhi, exposed to the elements. Depicting tranquil scenes of Ukraine’s countryside, some of his paintings were reportedly taken by Russian forces.
Part of the city’s Museum of Local Lore was reduced to ashes, after shelling by Russian forces. Artefacts there were also reportedly looted.
A statue stands outside of a building damaged in shelling in the port city of Mariupol. Credit: TASS/Sipa USA
Russian troops have reportedly stolen an estimated 2000 artefacts across the country, including Scythian gold in the city of Melitopol, a handwritten Torah scroll and a valuable gospel in Mariupol.
As of 30 May, UNESCO has verified damage to 139 cultural sites since the Russian invasion began on 24 February.
Sixty-two of these are religious sites, 12 are museums, 26 are historic buildings, 17 are buildings dedicated to cultural activities, 15 are monuments and 7 are libraries.
The priest of Yasnohorodka, in the outskirts of Kyiv, stands inside his church which was destroyed by Russian shelling. Source: NurPhoto / NurPhoto/NurPhoto via Getty Images
A collaboration between the Danish UNESCO National Commission, Blue Shield Denmark and Polycam, a leading 3D scanning application, the project encourages people in Ukraine to install the application, and use their mobile phones to scan nearby cultural sites and artefacts, creating a three-dimensional digital replica.
These 3D scans are then uploaded into a publicly accessible , capturing a detailed copy of the heritage object, before it’s too late.
Søren la Cour Jensen is the Chair of Blue Shield Denmark, a branch of an international organisation which works to protect the world’s cultural heritage and cultural values.
“[The Backup Ukraine application] is very simple, you just have to take a lot of pictures or film the [artefact or site] you want to record,” Mr la Cour Jensen tells SBS Dateline.
“The app takes care of the rest.”
The archive is growing by the day, and cultural heritage guardians like Mr la Cour Jensen hope that if heritage sites or artefacts are damaged, these scans will be imperative in assisting their eventual repair and restoration.
Encouraging users to record what is important to them, within their immediate surroundings, the app is being described as “democratic,’ as those in Ukraine have the autonomy to document what heritage is inherently important to them.
The term cultural heritage tends to apply to items a community believes are important, but Mr la Cour Jensen employs a wide definition.
“[Users] can decide for themselves what they think is heritage - [even] if it is their own house, their own street,” he says.
“We are primarily focusing on the classical heritage buildings, monuments and sites, [but] it makes people more aware, and maybe see their city in a different way.
“What would I be very sorry to lose?”
This is a question that encouraged Kyiv local Serhiy Tsaryk to download the app.
When the Russian invasion began, he moved to Lutsk, a small city in northwest Ukraine, which has a 4th century castle at its centre. He has already uploaded four monuments to the archive.
“There are many architectural monuments of different eras, Jesuit churches, Catholic churches with large dungeons, monasteries, synagogues and houses, each of which has its own value and history,” he tells SBS Dateline.
“Each monument carries the history of our country and our identity.
“When we lose our cultural heritage, we lose part of our soul.”
Serhiy Tsaryk is a former Kyiv local who has used the BackUp Ukraine application. Image digitally altered. Credit: Supplied.
“One tool in war - and this is the worst tool - is to kill people. Another tool is to undermine their identity and understanding of themselves,” she tells SBS Dateline.
“Cultural heritage is crucial for our identity. It provides us with a footing in the world. It helps to explain who we are.
“For fleeing Ukrainians it will be crucial for them to have something to return to. Something familiar. Or at least to know that what they love can be reconstructed.”
Before Russia’s invasion, Ukraine was a hub for technological innovation, with the IT industry an important part of the Ukrainian economy.
It’s only fitting that in a time of conflict, cultural guardians are turning to a nuanced digital resource to help protect its history and cultural identity.
The importance of having 3D scans of cultural heritage was realised after the 2019 fire at the Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris.
“There was data in cyberspace that could be downloaded and was used in the reconstruction,” Ms Gerner Nielsen says.
“As I understand, it has been relatively easy to reconstruct Notre-Dame, precisely because 3D models could be created of the individual details of the church.”
Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen is the Chairperson of the Danish UNESCO National Commission. Image digitally altered. Credit: Palle Skov.
An attack on identity
In a conflict where the identity and sovereignty of a country and its people lies at its core, the majority of sites destroyed in Ukraine are reportedly memorials and places of worship.
James Flexner, a senior lecturer in historical archeology and heritage at the University of Sydney, says places of worship tend to have key cultural significance.
“Places of worship are both usually important to people because it’s where you have your regular religious services but it’s also where people have major life events, it’s weddings, it’s funerals, it’s baptisms,” Dr Flexner tells SBS Dateline.
“And memorials are really important because they’re where people can construct a sense of their history.
“Memorials are always political entities, and they are there to produce a certain type of narrative, which is often tied up with nationalism and nostalgia.”
James Flexner, a senior lecturer in historical archeology and heritage at the University of Sydney. Image digitally altered.
“These [memorials and places of worship] might be the things that are being targeted precisely because there is a certain amount of historical revisionism in the Russian propaganda of the ideological justifications for their invasion of Ukraine,” Dr Flexner says.
“There’s something like 28,000 recognised cultural heritage sites around Ukraine.
“Every time you lose one of these places, or some artefacts are looted, that’s a little bit more of the world’s memory that we can’t get back.”
A war on culture
The loss of cultural heritage occurs in almost every armed conflict.
In 2015, IS militants in Iraq ransacked Mosul’s central museum and destroyed artefacts that dated from the Assyrian and Akkadian empires.
Taking sledgehammers to statues and watching them smash to the ground, the destruction was a bid to crush what they called ‘non-Islamic ideas.’
Mr la Cour Jensen says it’s been a common theme through history.
“We have seen it through the ages, from ancient times,” he says.
“The Egyptians, the Greeks, in war, destroyed each other's local heritage. It is to remove the hope and the belief of a future for the people you attack.
“If you remove the history, the foundation of the society and the foundation of the identity, you will break them.”
Volunteers put sandbags around the Monument to the Duke de Richelieu for protection from a possible Russian attack on the city of Odesa, Ukraine. Image digitally altered. Credit: Salwan Georges/The Washington Post via Getty Images.
She describes the 2001 shelling by the Taliban of two monumental Buddha statues in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley as a tactic to obliterate physical markers, structures and landscape that are part of a community’s lineage or shared understanding.
“Cultural heritage is what we all live for, it has always been used as a strategy of warfare to destroy what people hold dear about their culture,” she tells SBS Dateline.
“[The Taliban’s destruction of the Buddha statues] was kind of to send a message to the world that it didn’t fit into their worldview or ideology, so they destroyed it.
“It outraged the world at a time that they wanted to send the message that they’d do what they wanted.”
Alice Cannon, President of the Australian Institute for the Conservation of Cultural Materials. Credit: Rodney Start, Museums Victoria. Image digitally altered.
A digital silver-lining
For those working to preserve cultural heritage, the loss of memory is an uncomfortable thought.
“People do gradually forget about the stories that aren't so easily found,” Ms Cannon says.
Therefore, innovative technologies like that offered by Backup Ukraine are a welcome assistance when it comes to preserving at-risk histories. Ms Cannon suggests measures such as 3D scans could be used as a proactive measure rather than an after-thought when conflict is already waging.
“It never hurts to think about what could happen and how we might better have backups of some form,” she says.
“Digital preservation is a huge, newer issue … it's a way of transmitting knowledge [and] it's showing the advancement of engineering scientific thought.”
Statues are wrapped at the Saint Peter and Paul Garrison Church in Lviv, Ukraine. Image digitally altered. Credit: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
“Ideally you need both of these things to exist together if you are going to understand a particular past,” he says.
“It’s not really a reasonable possibility to go in and systematically document [cultural heritage] when it’s part of a warzone.
“[Backup Ukraine] has this great potential for recording things very rapidly and in many cases very precisely.”
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