Destroyed by ISIS, Syria’s cultural sites rise again in France

WHEN THE Islamic State was about to be driven out of the ancient city of Palmyra in March, Yves Ubelmann got a call from Syria’s director of antiquities.

An architect by training, Ubelmann, 36, had worked in Syria before the country was engulfed by war. But now there was special urgency for the kind of work his youthful team of architects, mathematicians and designers did from their offices in Paris: producing digital copies of threatened historical sites.

Palmyra, parts of it destroyed by the Islamic militants who deemed these monuments idolatrous, was still rigged with explosives. So he and Houmam Saad, his Syrian colleague, spent four days flying a drone with a robot camera over the crumbled arches and temples.

“Drones with four or six rotors can hover really close and register structural details, every crack and hole, and we can take very precise measurements,” said Ubelmann, who founded the company Iconem. “This is the stuff architects and archaeologists need.”

They need it in a new push for virtual preservation that scientists, archaeologists and others are compiling on a large scale. The records could be used to create computer models that would show how monuments and endangered historical sites might one day be restored, repaired or reconstructed.

Of special interest today are ancient sites in Syria, and also Iraq, that have suffered from war, looting and the Islamic State.

“The terrorists were uploading videos with them blowing up monuments and smashing statues to manipulate public opinion,” he said. “We felt the best response was to magnify the pictures of these places and show their splendor and their importance to the culture. It became a war of images.”

The latest front in that war is in the exhibition halls of the Grand Palais in Paris, where many of the 40,000 images he and his team took at Palmyra have become the basis for displays. Called “Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra,” the show aims to draw attention to the rising threats to global heritage.

President Francois Hollande of France described it as “an act of resistance” against terror and intolerance. Showing the beauty of the Middle Eastern heritage, he said, “is the best answer to the Islamist propaganda of hate, destruction and death.”

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Reuters Heavy smog is seen in the mountains over China’s Hebei province.

NYT Visitors inspect Eternal Sites: From Bamiyan to Palmyra, an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris.