Nepalese cultural sites also damaged
The Dharahara Tower tells the story of earthquakes in modern Nepal.
Built as a military watchtower by a 19th-century Mukhtiyar, or prime minister, to honour a queen, the original was an amalgam of styles, both Asian and European, resembling an Islamic minaret, but with the Hindu god of destruction, Shiva, perched on top.
It stood for barely a year before an earthquake toppled it in 1833. But it was rebuilt, only to collapse again a century later, in the massive earthquake of 1934.
The latest incarnation of the tower, a popular tourist site in the culturally rich nation on the south side of the Himalayan mountains, collapsed in Saturday’s earthquake with as many as 200 people reportedly inside. The ruins soon thronged with people pulling bodies out of the rubble.
“I had just bought tickets to climb the tower and was at its base when I felt a sudden shaking,” Dharmu Subedi, 36, told the AFP news service from a hospital bed in Kathmandu. “Within minutes, the Dharahara had crumbled to the ground with maybe more than 100 people in it.”
Panic and uncertainty over the human toll of the Nepalese earthquake, now in the thousands, has coincided with growing anguish at the cultural loss suffered by this nation with its long history of peaceful Hindu and Buddhist coexistence, only recently recovered from civil war.
“That is instant disaster on a large scale and you can’t exaggerate it,” said Jack Ives, a Canadian geographer who has worked in Nepal, often with United Nations University, as director of a major project on mountain environment.
“The damage to that World Heritage architecture is an appalling loss and we can’t measure the impact until we get more details. Reconstruction has been very effective (after past quakes), but that doesn’t say anything about the appalling loss of life.”
The devastation spans Kathmandu’s seven UNESCO World Heritage sites, the most of any city in the world, including Pashupatinath, a Hindu shrine to Shiva, which on Sunday was put to its ceremonial use as a riverside site for cremation, as the water flows on to meet the Ganges River, revered by Hindus. Also largely destroyed, although its dome survived, was the Boudhanath stupa, a Buddhist shrine and a focal point for Tibetan refugees, who came over the mountains fleeing persecution by their Chinese rulers, and the hilltop Monkey Temple of Swayambhunath, the oldest Buddhist stupa in the Kathmandu valley.
“We understand the historic Durbar squares of Kathmandu, Patan and Bhaktapur have been badly damaged,” Christian Manhart, Unesco’s representative to Nepal, told reporters. “Several temples have collapsed. Two temples in Patan have been completely collapsed, and Durbar Square is worse. Right now we are assessing the situation and collecting information on what the damage is.”
Pictures showed the three Durbar Squares — the main one in Kathmandu, called Hanuman Dhoka, with similar ones in Patan and Bhaktapur — reduced to piles of rubble and wood, where once temples stood for Hindu, Buddhist and animist rituals.