World Monuments: 50 Irreplaceable Sites to Discover and Champion

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A golden crown floats about two golden domes which sit atop two marble towers.

Above the crown, a blue ceiling is painted with golden stars; beneath the towers, pink marble columns frame an elaborate case. Inside the case are the five books of Moses.

Rich-colored patterns spread out to the walls beyond, all painted in Pompeian red. This is the ark of Tempel Synagogue in Krakow, Poland. The first time I saw it, I understood immediately that it had been built for a Jewish community that wanted its house of worship to reflect its wealth, its power, its status, and its modern tastes.

No such Jewish community exists in Krakow today. That fact alone would make Tempel Synagogue a strange architectural artifact, but its oddity doesn’t end there. There are six other working synagogues in Krakow’s old Jewish district, Kazimierz. They are all older—Jews have lived in Kazimierz since the Middle Ages—and some are larger. But Tempel Synagogue presents the greatest challenge to an outsider’s assumptions about the history of Polish Jews. Not only is it a Reform synagogue, the only one still remaining in Poland, it is also the only remaining Polish synagogue dating from the nineteenth century, a period of great Jewish expansion and growth.

More to the point, its elaborate design and its gilt interior make clear that its founders were not a hidden or a frightened minority.

Tempel Synagogue was built for a prosperous congregation, the Association of Progressive Israelites, whose members were proud of their building. They chose a fashionable decorating scheme, combining

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bright colors—an echo of the neo-Gothic style used in Krakow churches at the time—with “Moorish” elements derived from patterns found at the Alhambra in Spain.

The synagogue’s structure, with an ark in front rather than the traditional bima in the center, also reflected the modernizing ideas of the Reform movement.

The combined impact is powerful, unexpected: Tempel Synagogue doesn’t look like a traditional Polish synagogue, but it doesn’t resemble a Polish Catholic church either. The colors and the design evoke a glorious, exotic past, as well as optimism about the future.

Some of the members’ names are proudly visible on the stained glass windows, alongside the dates they donated them: Israel, Zygmunt and Victoria Gleitzman, 1897; Emilia Abelesow, 1895; Cecilia Bar Salomon, 1896.

On these windows, as in many other parts of the synagogue, the inscriptions are partly in Polish and partly in Hebrew. This too is significant: Unlike previous generations of Polish Jews, this was an assimilated congregation that spoke Polish, not Yiddish, and listened to sermons in Polish. This was also a confident congregation—doctors, lawyers, prominent businessmen—that continually improved and expanded its space. A major renovation took place in 1924, just after Poland regained its independence. Accounts from the 1930s show payments for an organ and a choir. Repairs and upkeep continued throughout the decade—right up to the moment when the synagogue ceased to exist.

The Nazi invasion shattered that optimism, and destroyed that future. When the Nazis marched into the city in September 1939, they closed more than ninety Krakow synagogues. Tempel Synagogue became a stable.

Deportation of Jews from the city began immediately.

Those who remained were pushed into a ghetto that was “liquidated” in 1942. Adolf Hitler wanted to preserve Krakow for the Germans, and he demanded that the city be made “racially pure” as quickly as possible.

The Association of Progressive Israelites ceased to exist. So did the families who had donated the stained glass and paid for the upkeep of the choir.

Their optimism, their self-confidence, and their public-spiritedness disappeared along with them.

As a physical structure, Tempel Synagogue survived the war. Miraculously, so did its marble ark and some of its stained glass. But the fumes from horse manure blackened the gilt on the ceiling, so much so that conservationists’ photographs of the damage show what looks like a photographic negative: everything that had been golden had turned black. The decorative paint had flaked off the walls, the floors were damaged, and the

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SPLIT SYNAGOGUE CROATIA

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Jewish people are believed to have first come to Split in the seventh century after nearby Salona (now Solin) was destroyed by the Avars, forcing a community that had been in existence since the third century A.D. to flee and find protection within Diocletian’s fortified palace. Only a few menorahs inscribed on stone blocks of Diocletian’s Palace testify to the early presence of Jewish people in Split.

The Jewish community grew substantially in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries as waves of Sephardic Jewish refugees fled Portugal, Spain, and Italy during the Inquisition.

Although Split’s Jewish community never exceeded more than a few hundred members, they had a considerable influence on the local economy.

The first synagogue of Split, most likely dating from Roman

times, was destroyed in a great fire in 1507. Soon after that, in another part of the city that later became the Jewish ghetto, this new synagogue was created by combining and converting the second floors of two medieval houses.

It remains one of the oldest Sephardic synagogues still in use.

During the Holocaust, Italian fascists severely damaged Split’s synagogue and publically destroyed most of the community’s ritual objects and archives. Many of Split’s Jewish community immigrated to Israel after the war, leaving only about 160 Jewish people in Split. During communist rule in Yugoslavia, Jewish people were not persecuted but they did not engage with religious life.

After the dissolution of the government of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s and the formation of an independent state, the Jewish community has been revived and has invested much effort in preserving the synagogue and the memory of an important element of Split’s layered history. Due to exterior damage, water had seeped into Split Synagogue’s structure and caused plaster deterioration within the interior sanctuary space. WMF’s efforts have included the restoration and replacement of damaged shutters, the repointing of the façade, and the repair of water-damaged surfaces within the sanctuary.

Split Synagogue is still an active place of worship and an important educational resource for learning about the Jewish community’s long presence in this historic city.

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EX T E N D E D CA P T IO N LOR E M T I TL E

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other community on earth are the people so dependent on the waters that surround them. In her early years the sea was her protection; while, in the fifth and sixth centuries, Goths, Huns and Vandals were laying waste the Italian peninsula, the inhabitants of the rich imperial cities on the mainland fled for their lives to the islands of the Venetian lagoon, where they knew that the barbarians could not touch them. Throughout the middle ages and the Renaissance the lagoon continued to do its job: Venice was the only major Italian city (if Italian she was; the Venetians would have hotly denied it) that was never once damaged or destroyed by one or more of her neighbours. And in the early twentieth century it was the lagoon – and only the lagoon – that saved Venice from the dreaded automobile and prevented the Piazza San Marco from being the world’s most beautiful parking lot.

But the Venetians never took their lagoon’s benevolence for granted. Already more than four hundred years ago they diverted the Brenta and Piave rivers respectively to the south and north of the lagoon, to prevent its gradual filling-up with silt and sand; and then in the eighteenth century they built three lines of murazzi – great walls of huge rough boulders – to protect themselves if and when things grew nasty. Which, in the early twentieth century, they did. The trouble, I suppose, could be said to have started after the First World War, with the creation of an extensive zone of heavy industry at Mestre, just opposite Venice on the mainland. Between the wars this brought much-needed employment to the area and did relatively little physical harm; after 1945, however, this industrial zone was trebled in size, spreading to Porto Marghera, and for the first time included heavy petrochemical plant which spewed out into the atmosphere what I was once told amounted to some 50,000 tons of concentrated sulphuric acid a year, eating its way into the stone, the marble, the brick, the bronze – virtually all the materials of which the city is constructed.

Simultaneously, these industries – largely for cooling purposes – were drawing immense quantities from the fresh water table which lies under the bed of the lagoon and which, through the wells in almost every campo, historically provided Venetians with their water supply.

The consequence was clear: the bed of the lagoon sank – by about 10 cm., or some 4 inches – and Venice sank with it. This alone was serious enough; but at the same time the sea levels were rising. They rose slowly at first; only in the 1950s did people begin to take notice of what was happening. But then, on those never-to-be-forgotten days of November 4 and 5 1966, a lethal combination of high tides, rivers swollen by the autumn rains and a fierce south-east scirocco wind raging up the Adriatic,

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piling up its waters at the northern end and then driving them into the lagoon, caused the worst flood in Venice’s history, rising to a height of 6ft. 4in. (194cm.).

Such, moreover, was the force of the wind that it counteracted the ebb tide, so that a second high tide came in on top of the first. And let us remember that in flooded towns and cities we are not just talking of water; we are talking about sewage, paint, fuel oil, corrosive acids and a thousand other hideosities that have been swept up in the deluge. Thousands of Venetians were left homeless; in those two nightmare days the city aged, perhaps, two hundred years. The waters which had protected Venice for over a millennium had suddenly turned against her.

But the catastrophe had one huge advantage. It awoke the world to the realization that there was something rotten in the state of Venice. UNESCO leaped into action, commissioning a detailed report and appealing

to its members for whatever help they could give – for the crisis was far too manifold and too urgent for Italy, already crushed by the weight of its cultural heritage, to manage by itself. The World Monuments Fund – only a year old at the time of the flood – was, it need hardly be said, one of the first to respond, setting up its headquarters in the Scuola di S. Giovanni Evangelista and initiating restoration work all over the city. Meanwhile we in Britain established the Venice in Peril Fund and other, similar organizations were founded in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Italy (of course) and many other countries, including even Australia. The result was by far the most ambitious conservation programme ever launched, dedicated to preserve not just a single great monument, but an entire city.

This programme, which is still in progress, has been spectacularly successful; but it has perforce concentrated on repairing damage caused in the past. We must now

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think long and hard about the future. The subsidence problem has been largely – if not entirely – solved; in the 1970s the Italian government built, with commendable speed, pipelines which now bring all the necessary water down from the Alps, enabling the industries to seal their wells and allowing the water table below the lagoon to return to its old balance – though we can never restore the 30 cm (very nearly a foot) of elevation that Venice has lost, owing partly to nature but mostly to man, in the past century. And the situation is deteriorating fast. According to figures provided by ISPRA, the Italian Environmental Protection Agency, the mean sea level has risen during the summer months about 10 cm.

(4 ins.) in the past three years. This rise is more dangerous now than ever it has been, because the water has overtopped the impermeable stone bases of most buildings and is being absorbed by the porous bricks above

them, gradually washing away the mortar. The damp has reached the upper floors and is rusting through the iron tie rods that hold the houses together. In the narthex of St Mark’s it is now at 6 metres, causing the tesserae of the thousand-year-old mosaics to loosen and ultimately fall to the floor below. Meanwhile, parts of Venice that used to flood once a year are now flooding once a week. The hundred-year storm has become the ten-year storm, and threatens to become the one-year storm. No wonder so many Venetians are packing up and – in direct reverse of their early ancestors – taking refuge on the mainland.

What is being done? In order to prevent Venice from becoming the next Atlantis, the city has developed a project known as MOSE (Modulo Sperimentale Elettromeccanico) to protect the city against the worst of the floods. Essentially, this is an ingenious system consisting of rows of mobile gates installed at the three

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the possibility of a rise of up to 82 cm, over 32 inches.

Even at best, we have to face the fact that if Venice is to be saved in the long term, MOSE will not be enough; according to a report published by UNESCO in 2011: There should be no doubt that the sea level will eventually rise to a value that will not be sustainable for the lagoon and its old city. The planned mobile barriers might be able to avoid flooding for the next decades, but the sea will eventually rise to a level where even continuous closures will not be able to protect the city from flooding. The question is not if this will happen, but only when it will happen.

In other words, some time in the second half of the present century, we shall have to start thinking again, and unless we can come up with another, still more ambitious and still more expensive plan – and the last estimate for MOSE was $5.5 billion – Venice must, sooner or later, disappear beneath the waves. On the other hand – for who knows? – all might be well. Sea levels may stop rising, and the technology of the twenty-second century may well point to new solutions that we can barely dream of today.

In any case, however many centuries we may have left, we have a duty to do all we can to help and protect the city, and to show it the respect it deserves. Alas, the authorities seem to be doing precisely the opposite.

Thanks to their refusal to take any action against uncontrolled international tourism, Venice is being almost literally suffocated. No one knows how many tourists visit every year; to count the number of hotel beds occupied ignores the fact that the vast majority come for the day only, often in huge groups. They spend little money: they mostly just sit around the Piazza, bored to tears, not even going into St Mark’s – perhaps put off by those

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our consciousness of who we are, is deeply connected to our society and its history. That history is preserved by the monuments and artifacts that constitute our legacy from past generations; they are the touchstones of our memory, the wellsprings of our imaginations.

These monuments have an intrinsic value that makes them worth protecting, and governments will be well served to recognize this in their development policies and the projects that they allow to go forward.

It is true that most government spending must be subjected to a review of economic costs and benefits. Such cost-benefit analysis must avoid the purely monetary financial profit-maximizing logic of the private investor and look to the benefits that would accrue to society as a whole, and to future generations, by promoting development policies that would protect our cultural heritage while simultaneously responding to the felt needs of the populations.

Some saw tourism as a savior, as it could create an “economic” justification for protecting the cultural heritage of poor societies and the usually poor inhabitants who live close to the ancient monuments that tourists visit. Yet that argument is fraught with problems.

First, some monuments are so unique that they cannot be subjected to the logic of cost-benefit analysis. Allowing them to decay or to be destroyed is not an option. Thus, the Pyramids and the Sphinx are to be maintained, and in dealing with the maintenance or restoration of such monuments we talk of the cost-effectiveness of the technique to be employed, and not whether the benefits justify the expense.

Second, for other, less prominent buildings or peripheral areas, we can estimate the costs and benefits.

These benefits have been taken by some to be based on the stream of revenues generated by tourism. Tourism can be one of the components of the benefits that justify action on monuments and the cultural heritage of a nation, but it would be a mistake to make it the sole component in the calculation of benefits. If it were, it would lead to three erroneous and indefensible conclusions: 1. that heritage sites that a bunch of foreigners are not interested in coming to see are not worth saving; 2. that we should maximize the number of tourists visiting such heritage sites, even if it means denaturing that which we are trying to preserve, be it pristine wilderness, or a way of life, or the special character of historic areas; and 3. that in case there are alternative investments—for example, a casino on the beach that would bring more

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and the ancient temple over which it was built.

But Freud is uncomfortable with this inspired if chimerical flight of fancy that seems to have gone too far, at least insofar as Rome is concerned. The vision of a space untouched by time, where old buildings stand not just alongside newer ones, but are embedded in them as well, where ancient Roman monuments that had been plundered of their stones can be nested in the same exact space as latter-day palaces built with those self-same plundered stones is a surrealist vision that Freud can’t countenance for long. You cannot dismantle the bronze portals of Rome’s Pantheon and have them molten to build Bernini’s baldachin in St. Peter’s and still expect the Pantheon and St. Peter’s to contain the same bronze parts. Freud is not at all wrong in suggesting that all of Roman history is present in every single instance of the city; he simply cannot visualize—or refuses to visualize—how two buildings can coexist on the same spot.

Freud was fond of the archaeological model, but the image of multiple time zones cohabiting alongside one another is too much for him. And so, the very man who tells his patients to probe their wildest fantasies, takes back the whole vision: “There is clearly no point in spinning our fantasy any further, for it leads us to

things that are unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in space; the same space cannot have two different contents.” Freud’s stratified analogy had served its purpose and this is where it ends. No point in taking it any further, he says.

And yet what Freud had done, perhaps unconsciously, was to tap into something altogether unthinkable. Not the succession of time zones—which is entirely thinkable—but the collapsing and eventual erasure of temporal zones. Like Freud’s fantasized Rome where layers of time zones are constantly being reshuffled, the psyche may be likened to a soufflé in the making, where dreams, desire, fantasy, experience, and memory are all being folded into one another, without sequence or logic or the semblance of a coherent narrative. Rome, the eternal landfill, is nothing more than a hodge-podge of constantly reshuffled tenses: mostly the imperfect tense, marginally the present, and heavily the conditional and subjunctive moods, all fumbling in a strange, imponderable medley which Latin scholars call the irrealis mood, that indescribable time zone where most of us mortals spend most of our days with might have beens that haven’t really happened but aren’t unreal for not happening, and might still happen though

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Two of the greatest icons of Portuguese architectural heritage are the Tower of Belém and Jerónimos Monastery.

At the end of the 15th century, King D. João II of Portugal commissioned the Tower of Belém as part of a tripartite defensive network to protect the port of Lisbon.

In the early 16th century, as the tower and its hull-shaped bastion were fully realized, the fortress came to resemble a galleon petrified in stone.

Belem had become a vital launching point for Portuguese exploration abroad and this is reflected in the Manueline tower’s design (Portuguese late Gothic style). From its naval-inspired exterior motifs

to the vented casemate, which was designed to accommodate the new developments in 16th century artillery that helped to solidify Portugal’s maritime empire, the tower’s architecture crystallizes an age in which Portugal became the first great international commercial and maritime empire in early modern Europe.

The nearby Jerónimos monastery was designed by Diogo de Boitaca, who commenced the work in the early 16th century. Work was continued

by João de Castilho from 1517 onwards and completed by Diogo de Torralva in 1540– 1541. Due to its significance and symbolism, the cloister is today another of the most

important examples of the Manueline style.

WMF has been privileged to work with the Portuguese Government on the conservation of both of these heritage sites. A highlight of WMF’s activities is the collaborative nature of the work and the way resources are harnessed and leveraged to make projects possible. The Tower of Belém project was launched with a small research grant from the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and the subsequent project at Jerónimos Monastery brought together resources from the Kress Foundation, the Robert W. Wilson Challenge to Conserve Our Heritage, and matching funds from the Portuguese Government.

In 1994, WMF compiled a survey on the state of conservation at the Tower of Belém, which systematically identified and mapped deterioration and alterations found on each stone. In 1997 and 1998, conservators cleaned biological growth from stone surfaces and improved waterproofing measures to protect surfaces that were most exposed to rain. The project also involved improving visitor access and site interpretation so that tourists would understand

more fully the importance of the history of the site.

At the Jeronimos monastery, WMF’s work addressed a variety of conservation needs, bringing renewed attention to the importance of the cloister as a serene place for prayer, meditation, and leisure.

Recently a new phase of work has been launched at these sites, building upon the conservation plans of the 1990s and 2000s and continuing the collaboration between WMF and the Portuguese Government.

Lead funding from the Annenberg Foundation is being matched by a European corporate donor. Once again, the greatest issues are creating an environment for sustaining resources overtime to continue to safeguard these extraordinary places that give shape and meaning to the places we treasure.

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it wishes to go. And the example Feud brings up is perhaps the most telling: Nero’s golden house.

Known as the domus aurea, Nero built his palace on the ashes of the great fire of 64 A.D. that ravaged a sizable portion of Rome. Whether Nero was responsible for setting the city ablaze to clear the land for his palace or whether he even strummed his lyre as he watched the city burn is open to conjecture. Chances are he was guilty of neither. His 200-acres house with tis surrounding grounds held 300 room and was an opulent and sumptuous edifice as well as one of the most architecturally innovative and sophisticated structure built in antiquity.

It boasted marbles brought from all corners of the empire and had gold leaf laminations on its walls the likes of which had never been seen before. Nero also had an artificial lake built where ships could sail. The grounds comprised woods, waterfalls, vineyards, and a simulated sea village. At the head of the lake stood a colossal statue of Nero, built to emulate—or compete with—the Colossus of Rhodes. In short, Nero’s domus was the Versailles of the Roman world, except bigger and more lavish.

But Nero was a ruthless monarch. Sensing that Rome was about to have him ignominiously executed, he took his own life, as a result of which he was punished by having his name obliterated from the city’s history, a measure called damnatio memoriae, which would also have interested a man like Freud. Nero was purged from the city’s memory. As a result, the domus aurea itself was stripped of its glorious art then buried in sand, it too expunged from memory. After Nero’s name was scrapped and his house buried, Titus built his baths right atop the domus aurea, as did Trajan with his own more elaborate baths. Emperor Domitian built his palace over portions of the domus, and Hadrian had the Temple of Venus built over its atrium. As a final damnatio memoriae, Nero’s lake was drained but the giant statue remained and right above the site of the lake, Vespasian built the Coliseum, named not because of its size but because of Nero’s statue, over whose neck, incidentally, sat the head of whichever emperor who came afterwards.

Paradoxically, the desire to bury all traces of Nero was so fierce that the foundations put in place to support the baths of Titus and Trajan above the domus ended up, not obliterating Nero’s domus but preserving it. This is pure Freud.

The domus was discovered by accident when someone in the fifteenth century fell into a crack in the ground and landed into Nero’s majestic palace. Ever since, its frescoes have been an inspiration to many artists, including Raphael. But it has had a checkered history. Opened to visitors, it was closed, then reopened and closed,

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J U STI N DAV ID S O N

Stand in the middle of zócalo, the vast expanse that’s been at the heart of Mexico City since before Hernán Cortes showed up, and you have a choice.

You can walk down freshly swept and washed avenues towards a horizon of glittering skyscrapers, or head the other direction, into narrow streets where sidewalk vendors spill into traffic lanes, hawking pirated DVDs and plastic gewgaws, where the air is filled with the tinny lo-fi jangle of corridos and the ever-present smell of frying pork. The city’s historic

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miniaturized version of the Forbidden City, reproducing the same basic processional structure. Its main buildings evoke the primary edifices of the larger complex, with similar public courtyards preceding private ones. Its 1.8 acres were meant to encapsulate the overall structure of the 180-acre Forbidden City. It was also intended as an outsize version of a scholar’s garden, adapting subtle landscape principles from the southern gardens of Suzhou, Yangzhou, and Hangzhou for grand purposes.

It would not be a classic scholar’s rockery, nor a locus of imperial magnificence; it would blend the contemplative poetry of one with the stately ambition of the other. To its twenty-seven structures, the emperor gave names that signal his hopes for the place: one enters through the Gate of Spreading Auspiciousness, and passes through, among others, the Hall of Fulfilling Original Wishes, the Building of Extending Delight, the Belvedere of Viewing Achievements, and the Supreme Chamber of Cultivating Harmony. The emperor himself not only named such buildings, but also was the primary designer of the garden.

The divide in China between court intrigue and the life of scholars is central to any study of the country’s culture, and had been pronounced since at least the Northern Song dynasty (960 to 1127 A.D.). Though scholar-painters were often banished for their criticisms of the government, some producing paintings and poems in miserable exile, it was widely accepted that their work was of greater consequence than the showy, decorative work of the court. Indeed, paintings and calligraphy by many of the same scholars who had been ejected from the capital later entered the imperial collections. Literati aesthetics define Qianlong’s garden project, informed by his travels to inspect the southern territories of his realm. The rockeries, plantings, and waterways at the retirement garden, all constructed on a flat piece of land, evoke the mountain landscapes of south China as portrayed in Song and Ming painting.

The life envisioned for the Juanqinzhai was a solitary one, as befits the literati ideal of contemplation; the elegant building bespeaks cultivated seclusion. The richly ornamented theater that occupies much of the interior has only one seat. But despite this literati conception, the construction of the Juanqinzhai reflects Qianlong’s ebullient profligacy; even the building’s framing timbers are polished hardwoods. The eastern five of the Juanqinzhai’s nine bays contain the emperor’s living quarters, ranged over two levels, and include sleeping and sitting platforms in sixteen separate spaces. This flank features an entire wall of zitan, the purple sandalwood beloved of emperors that was exceedingly rare at the time and is now nearly extinct. Large jade cartouches are set

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