1954 Hague Convention – Illicit Cultural Property

Cemeteries, Crown Jewels, Fakes, and War

Recent cultural heritage events remind me that protection is often weakest before anyone thinks to call it protection. A cemetery becomes “vacant” land. A museum becomes a little too open. A forged provenance becomes plausible enough. A customs rule turns movement into uncertainty. A damaged monument returns to Italy. The dramatic theft still has its place. Crown jewels stolen from the Louvre will always draw attention. But the quieter stories may tell us more about how heritage is actually lost: slowly, administratively, through development pressure, through market incentives that reward thin provenance and quick sales, and sometimes violently, in the gap between what the law promises and what institutions are prepared to do.

Heritage can also disappear through neglect, development, poor records, wishful thinking, legal uncertainty, military force, or a stamp on the back of a painting that looks just plausible enough.

In Northeast Houston, residents are raising concerns that development may threaten an abandoned Black cemetery. The legally recognized cemetery parcel is small, but longtime resident Roscoe Bluitt remembers headstones extending more widely into the wooded land nearby. A 2014 survey reportedly identified possible graves at least partly outside the known cemetery boundaries, and Houston officials have placed a stop-work order on the site while the next steps are considered. Advocates are now calling for a more thorough investigation, potentially including ground-penetrating radar.

Roscoe Bluitt, a lifelong resident of northeast Houston, describes his memories of a now abandoned Black cemetery where developers are clearing a nearby property. Jason Fochtman/Houston Chronicle

The story is painfully familiar. Burial grounds, especially Black cemeteries, are often “forgotten” only after systems of ownership, recordkeeping, maintenance, and development have made them easy to ignore. By the time a neighbor notices bulldozers, the law is already playing catch-up. The question is not simply whether a parcel is listed as a cemetery. It is whether the community, the city, the developer, and the state are willing to ask what may have been missed.

A very different kind of vulnerability is on display in the continuing discussion of museum security after the Louvre crown jewels theft. The New York Times recently used that heist to examine a broader design problem for museums: how to protect collections without turning institutions into fortresses. The article notes not only the Louvre robbery, but also thefts from an off-site storage facility of the Oakland Museum of California, damage at Chihuly Garden and Glass in Seattle, and the recent theft of works by Renoir, Cézanne, and Matisse from the Magnani-Rocca Foundation near Parma.

The challenge is that the museum ideal of openness sits uneasily with the needs of security. Glass, light, gardens, open galleries, and accessible storage can all help museums feel less forbidding. They can also create blind spots, entry points, or tempting routes of escape. The best security seems to be less about a single dramatic barrier and more about layers: thoughtful site design, sightlines, lighting, staffing, cameras, object-level alarms, and best of all the good old-fashioned human response. A camera, as one consultant put it, cannot get out of its chair.

Then there are the fakes. A father and daughter have pleaded guilty in connection with a multimillion-dollar forgery scheme involving works presented as Banksy, Andy Warhol, Andrew Wyeth, Richard Mayhew, Raimonds Staprans, Fritz Scholder, and others. Prosecutors described a scheme using forged works made in Poland, antique paper, and fabricated gallery stamps from defunct galleries to make the objects appear more credible. Forgery stories are often treated as colorful art-world scandals, and they are that. But they also show how fragile the market’s trust mechanisms can be in a market that continues to value privacy and discretion. Provenance is not just a nice story attached to an object.

This photo provided by Tulane University classical archeologist Susann Lusnia in October 2025 shows the 1,900-year-old grave marker of a Roman sailor named Sextus Congenius Verus, discovered in a New Orleans backyard. (Susann Lusnia via AP)

There was also a quieter and more hopeful story this week. A nearly 2,000-year-old Roman grave marker discovered in a New Orleans backyard has been returned to Italy. The marble epitaph, dedicated to Sextus Congenius Verus, was eventually matched to an object missing from a museum in Civitavecchia, near Rome. The likely path to New Orleans seems to have involved a U.S. soldier who served in Italy and later kept the stone at his home. The FBI coordinated the return, and the object is now headed back.

The movement of objects is also being shaped by a less romantic force: tariffs. The Art Newspaper reports that after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s unilateral tariffs as unconstitutional, the administration imposed a new tariff regime of up to 15 percent under a different emergency powers law, prompting further litigation and continued uncertainty for the art and antiques trade. Dealers described confusion over whether exemptions for antiques over 100 years old will remain secure, and whether shipping, tariffs, and fuel surcharges will make some transactions commercially impossible. Tariffs may seem far removed from grave markers, forged art, or museum alarms. But they matter because cultural objects move through ordinary commercial channels. Dealers, collectors, museums, conservators, shippers, and customs brokers all operate inside systems of cost and uncertainty. When the rules shift suddenly, especially around imports, the market adjusts. One suspects, uncertainty makes the already opaque parts of the trade even harder to see.

Finally, a much darker reminder that cultural heritage protection cannot be separated from the conduct of war. More than 200 scholars and cultural professionals (including me) signed a statement criticizing damage to Iranian cultural heritage during U.S.-Israeli strikes and the international response to that damage. The statement invokes the 1954 Hague Convention and argues that more than 130 registered UNESCO and national monuments and museums have reportedly been damaged since the start of the conflict. It also criticizes international institutions for what the signatories view as an inadequate response when powerful states are involved.

The Art Newspaper’s coverage notes reported damage to sites including Golestan Palace in Tehran, the Chehel Sotoun building of the Persian Garden in Isfahan, the Jame Mosque of Isfahan, and sites near the Prehistoric Sites of the Khorramabad Valley. UNESCO has acknowledged damage and expressed concern, while the statement’s organizers argue that concern is not enough when legal protections lack enforcement.

This is the hard edge of cultural heritage law. The 1954 Hague Convention rests on the premise that damage to cultural property belonging to any people is a loss to all humanity. But that principle is only as strong as the willingness of states and institutions to apply it consistently. The problem is not that we lack legal language. What is often missing is consequence.

Taken together, these stories point to the same larger lesson. Cultural heritage protection is not a single switch that the law turns on after something has gone wrong. The law matters. But the law often arrives late. The harder work is to build protection into ordinary practice, before the bulldozer, before the ancient stone becomes patio décor, and before a historic site is reduced to a damage assessment. Heritage is most vulnerable where attention is weakest.

Sam González Kelly, Houston Residents Worry Development Threatens a Black Cemetery. They’re Fighting to Protect It., Houston Chronicle (May 1, 2026), https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/article/black-cemetery-history-construction-22218009.php , archived at https://perma.cc/WJ6H-3J27.

Sam Lubell, After the Heists: Securing Museums Without Closing Them Off, The New York Times (Apr. 18, 2026), https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/18/arts/design/museums-security.html.

Jake Offenhartz, Father and Daughter Admit to $2M Banksy and Warhol Art Forgery Scam, Independent, https://uk.news.yahoo.com/father-daughter-admit-2m-banksy-082920547.html, archived at https://perma.cc/HCQ6-5HZX (last visited May 2, 2026).

More than 200 Cultural Figures Sign Statement Criticising International Response to Destruction of Iran’s Heritage, The Art Newspaper – International art news and events, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/04/15/more-than-200-cultural-figures-sign-statement-criticising-international-response-to-destruction-of-iran-heritage (last visited May 2, 2026).

Ancient Roman Gravestone Found in New Orleans Back Yard Returned to Italy, the Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/may/01/roman-gravestone-new-orleans-returned-italy, archived at https://perma.cc/75LC-7R43 (last visited May 2, 2026).

Art Trade Adjusting after US Supreme Court Struck down Trump’s Extreme Tariffs, The Art Newspaper – International art news and events, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2026/05/01/trump-tariffs-struck-down-supreme-court-art-trade-adjusts (last visited May 2, 2026).

A dark threat to commit crimes against Iranian culture

*Letter, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander-in-Chief, AFH to All Commanders, Subject: Historic Monuments, December 29, 1943* (via).

The treatment of cultural heritage during armed conflict has received an unwelcome wave of attention after President Trump made the decision to threaten Iranian cultural sites with an attack over the weekend. In a series of tweets on Saturday, Trump stated that “if Iran strikes any Americans, or American assets,” that the United States has targeted 52 Iranian sites. This troubling threat would violate the Pentagon’s own War Manual, and the 1954 Hague Convention on Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. Article 4 of the 1954 Convention requires Parties to respect cultural property by refraining from using such property or its surroundings for any purpose which may lead to its damage or destruction.

This is the kind of shortsighted and callous thinking I never thought I’d see displayed by an American President. But sadly President Trump has joined many of the absolute worst leaders in history in choosing to threaten the culture of another people. The threat marks a sharp reversal of decades of work done by the State Department and others in American public life to protect and preserve the cultural heritage of all nations. What a disgrace.

It might be useful to compare the current President’s callous indifference to culture with that of General Dwight D. Eisenhower. In 1943, during the Second World War, General Eisenhower issued an order to his commanders to protect monuments and culture on the eve of the allied invasion of Italy:

Today we are fighting in a country which has contributed a great deal to our cultural inheritance, a country rich in monuments which by their creation helped and now in their old age illustrate the growth of the civilization which is ours. We are bound to respect those monuments so far as war allows.

If we have to choose between destroying a famous building and sacrificing our own men, then our men’s lives count infinitely more and the building must go. But the choice is not always so clear-cut as that. In many cases the monuments can be spared without any detriment to operational needs. Nothing can stand against the argument of military necessity. That is an accepted principle. But the phrase ‘military necessity’ is sometimes used where it would be more truthful to speak of military convenience or even of personal convenience. I do not want it to cloak slackness or indifference.

Note that there was no hint of military necessity in Trump’s words.

A wave of sharp condemnation has followed the President’s threats, more than I can catalog here. The Archaeological Institute of America called “upon President Trump and the U.S. Department of Defense to protect civilians and cultural heritage in Iran, and to reaffirm that U.S. military forces will comply only with lawful military orders.”

Brian Daniels and Patty Gerstenblith in a letter to the New York Times argued:

The world community, including the United States, has rightly condemned the intentional destruction of cultural heritage for decades. Hitler’s Germany, Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic State and the Assad regime in Syria intentionally destroyed cultural heritage in the absence of any military necessity. If Mr. Trump carries out this threat, the United States will join the ranks of these destroyers of the world’s cultural legacy.

Brett McGurk, the former U.S. special envoy for fighting ISIS tweeted that “American military forces adhere to international law. They don’t attack cultural sites.”

In an OpEd in the LA Times Prof. Sara Bronin argued “A nation that willfully destroys another country’s heritage would be no better than the criminals who have destroyed irreplaceable sites in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere in recent years.”

Writing for the Guardian, Simon Jones argued that the “threat to destroy the sites of ancient Persia should send a shiver down the spine of any civilised person.”

Writing in the Art Newspaper, Francesco Bandarin, a former senior official at UNESCO rightly pointed out that “[t]he territory of modern Iran has been home to some of the greatest civilisations of mankind from prehistory to classical antiquity down to modern times. Iran today has 24 sites on the Unesco World Heritage List. A deliberate attack would presumably target historic cities and monuments or archaeological areas.”

On Sunday, John Bellinger III, a legal advisor for the State Department under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2009 called on Defense Secretary Mark Esper and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Millet to publicly affirm that the United States will still comply with the 1954 Hague Convention. He also argued that the White House should learn the domestic and international law rules that govern the use of military force.

One of those reasons that ignorance is so costly of course is that when a culture is targeted, that makes any mission or conflict existential, and makes an ultimate victory more difficult and costly to achieve. Any thinking leader would appreciate this simple fact.

Stone on UK ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention

Peter Stone argues in the Art Newspaper that the UK ratification of the 1954 Hague Convention really is a big deal:

Is this really a big deal? Actually, yes it is, on all sorts of levels. Those of us in the heritage community are often told to stop complaining and to understand that in war things get damaged and destroyed. True, but from Sun Tzu in sixth-century BC China to Dwight Eisenhower in the 20th century, generals and military strategists have argued that the destruction of cultural heritage is bad military practice (not least because it frequently provides the first excuse for the next conflict).

There are at least seven different risks to heritage during conflict: lack of planning; spoils of war; collateral damage; military lack of awareness; looting; enforced neglect and specific targeting. All of them can be addressed to a greater or lesser extent, thereby reducing overall the impact. Protecting cultural heritage is not only important to specialised academic interests, heritage represents communal memory, and access to it has recently been argued to be a human right by the UN’s special rapporteur for cultural rights. It contributes to well-being and can foster post-conflict economic stability by encouraging tourism.

Finally, it is increasingly recognised as a military “force-multiplier”—protecting the heritage of your enemy may not win you many friends but it should ensure you do not make more enemies: a lesson hard-learnt from numerous recent cases where cultural heritage was ignored and not protected by occupying forces leading to unnecessary problems and casualties.

Peter Stone, Why ratifying the Hague Convention matters, The Art Newspaper (2016.11.29).

UK Pledges to Ratify 1954 Hague Convention (again)

The UK seems poised to ratify the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. The Convention responded to the horrible theft and destruction which took place during World War II. The UK Government has at various points in the past indicated ratification of the Convention was imminent, including in 2004, as pointed out by the IAL blog. It was even an original signatory to the agreement when it was adopted. But ratification has been slow, even leading Colin Renfrew to accuse the UK of “dithering” over ratification. It seems that dithering may now be coming to an end. The new culture secretary, John Whittingdale, has indicated he will introduce legislation to formally bring the UK in line with the 115 other countries which have ratified the Convention. The UK has claimed to have been in compliance with the Convention anyway, so the practical changes brought about by the UK ratification seems to be slight. But the symbolic effect is considerable.

In his statement Whittingdale said:

While the UK’s priority will continue to be the human cost of these horrific conflicts, the UK must also do what we can to prevent any further cultural destruction.The loss of a country’s heritage threatens its very identity. The knowledge and expertise of the experts in our cultural institutions makes us uniquely qualified to help. I believe that the UK therefore has a vital responsibility to support cultural protection overseas.

A terrific sentiment, and one that will hopefully will lead to ratification of the Convention.

Some of the other comments made by Whittingdale though may do more in the near term for heritage in conflict zones. He announced a new “cultural protection fund” which would help safeguard cultural heritage in conflict areas. Funding if deployed well could have a positive impact. He also announced a summit bringing together individuals from the government and institutions like the British Museum, the V&A, and perhaps others.

Dalya Alberge, Peer Furious at UK “dithering” over Treaty to Protect Cultural Heritage, the Guardian (2015).

Martin Bailey, UK to ratify Hague Convention—’at the first opportunity’ (Jun. 22, 2015).

Toby Helm, Britain Signs Convention on Protecting Treasures in War Zones, the Guardian (2015).

UK to Adopt Hague Convention to Protect Artefacts in War Zones, BBC News (2015).

UNESCO Director General Bokova on Protecting Cultural Heritage during conflict

Damage in Aleppo, Syria

In an op-ed for the IHT UNESCO Director General Irina Bokova discusses the damage done to cultural sites in northern Mali, Syria and elsewhere. She argues that “Culture stands on the frontline of conflicts, deliberately targeted to fuel hatred and block reconciliation.” That’s exactly right I think. The challenge will be what the rest of the world can do to prevent and repair this destruction.

She outlines the concrete steps UNESCO is taking: crafting an international legal framework, building stronger culture coalitions, and use culture to prevent conflicts:

Unesco works across the globe to harness the power of culture to bring people together and foster reconciliation. I saw this personally when Unesco helped restore the Old Bridge in Mostar, Bosnia Herzegovina, destroyed during the war in the 1990s. We saw the same power during the restoration of the Koguryio Tombs complex in North Korea, undertaken with the financial support of South Korea. This might sound high-minded compared to the terrible news we hear every day from conflict zones. And it is true that culture alone is not enough to build peace. But without culture, peace cannot be lasting. The world thought big when the convention was adopted in 1972. We need to think big once again, to protect culture under attack. We often hear that protecting culture is a luxury better left for another day, that people must come first. The fact is, protecting culture is protecting people — it is about protecting their way of life and providing them with essential resources to rebuild when war ends. This is why, for culture also, there is a responsibility to protect.

Irina Bokova, Culture in the Cross Hairs, The New York Times, December 2, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/opinion/03iht-edbokova03.html (last visited Dec 3, 2012).

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Ratifications

In July the Netherlands accepted the 1970 UNESCO Convention and it will enter into force on the 17th of October, 2009.

Also, Italy has ratified the Second Protocol to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Damage to Heritage in Gaza

Lauren Gelfond Feldinger has a report in the Art Newspaper to damage to Gaza’s cultural sites:

JERUSALEM. After a 3,500-year history of invasions, the latest war on the beleaguered coastal strip of Gaza has once again put historic sites at risk.

The fragile ceasefire in force at the time of writing has allowed some information to emerge about the fate of Gaza’s cultural heritage. Gaza’s only museum, a private antiquities museum run by Gazan contractor and collector Jawdat Khoudary, was badly damaged during Israel’s 22 days of air and land strikes. The glass doors and windows have been shattered and the roof and walls have been damaged. Roman and Byzantine pottery, Islamic bronze objects and many amphorae have been destroyed, initially during shooting 20m to 200m away, and later because of nearby shelling, with one direct hit to the museum’s conference hall, Mr Khoudary said. Amphorae, clay and ceramic vessels with two looped handles, were created in Gaza and the region during the fourth to seventh centuries for holding wine, olive oil and food and trading perishable commodities.

Meanwhile, anxieties are growing about the fate of the city’s antiquities. “I am very concerned: the entire Gaza Strip is an archaeological site,” Palestinian archaeologist Professor Moain Sadeq said.

Professor Sadeq founded the Palestinian Antiquities Department of Gaza in 1994, and is currently a visiting lecturer at the University of Toronto while in contact daily with Gaza. “Historical sites and buildings in Gaza are adjacent to urban areas, so any location that was hit as a target also put the nearby historical sites and buildings in danger,” he said. Major sites where damage is expected because of heavy fighting in adjacent areas include: Tell es-Sakan, an early Bronze Age settlement that is the largest and oldest walled Canaanite city in the local region, and the oldest Egyptian fortified site outside of Egypt; Tel el-Ajull, an important middle and late Bronze period city that was an important trade hub between ancient Egypt and the Levant; and the remains of Anthedon, a Hellenist port. The Byzantine church of Jabalya was also near heavy fighting, and was the site of partial damage by Israeli tanks during an incursion in 2005. Al-Zeitoun residential quarter in Gaza’s Old City, a medieval historic district, has also been largely destroyed, Professor Sadeq added.

Archaeologists are expecting assessment of all of Gaza’s historical sites to be slow. As humanitarian assistance is the urgent priority, serious archaeological surveys of historic sites will be delayed. “I hope that Israel and the Palestinians will work to restore the sites. I am worried about Gaza sites that were excavated and are above the ground because I am sure during the military activity that some sites have been damaged,” Dr Yigal Yisrael, of the Israel Antiquities Authority Ashkelon region and Western Negev said.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

Chicago, Cuno and Iraq

Tom Hundley has a very long piece in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune on antiquities looting, Iraq, and Jim Cuno’s arguments (with slideshow). It’s an interesting read, as it summarizes nicely some of the problems with antiquities looting in Iraq, which he argues began in the difficult economic times after the first Iraq War.

At the close of the war in 1991, as Saddam fought off insurrections from the Kurds in the north and the Shiites in the south, the U.S. government imposed a no-fly zone over large swaths of Iraq. This, along with strict UN trade sanctions, created a kind of perfect storm. With the weakened Baghdad regime unable to control large parts of the country, impoverished Iraqi villagers—often with the blessing of village elders—turned to the only source of income available to them: scavenging the hundreds of archeological sites that dot the landscape between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers.

In some areas, the trade in looted antiquities accounted for almost 85 percent of local economic activity. Meanwhile, a weak U.S. economy at the end of George H. W. Bush’s presidency was encouraging the truly rich to look for alternatives to stocks and bonds. Art and antiquities fit the bill. As supply obligingly met demand, the market for Mesopotamian antiquities blossomed. Within months of the war’s end, a treasure trove of Mesopotamian antiquities began to show up in the gilded display rooms of auction houses in London and New York, no questions asked.

The article then goes on to summarize James Cuno’s views, and gives a very superficial discussion of national patrimony laws. He writes incorrectly I think that the Hague and UNESCO Conventions are the foundation for national patrimony laws. I think that’s a questionable assertion, as many patrimony laws were established long before these.

It is worth noting that there is a gross factual inaccuracy in the piece. Despite what the article says, the U.S. has ratified the 1954 Hague Convention. Perhaps Hundley should have spent a bit more time talking with Patty Gerstenblith, whom he quotes in the piece, or even Larry Rothfield — another Chicagoan — who has written a recent work on the looting in Iraq.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

United States Senate Finally Ratifies the 1954 Hague Convention

On September 25th, the Senate gave its advice and consent and ratified the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict. The treaty was submitted to the Senate by President Clinton in 1999. You can read the statement submitted by the Lawyers Committee for Cultural Heritage Preservation, and other heritage advocacy groups here.

Pictured here is a “Blue Shield” in Austria I pulled from Flickr. The text reads:

“Protected by the convention of The Hague, dated 14 May 1954, for the protection of cultural property in the event of armed conflict. (BGBI. No. 58 3rd April 1964).”

I’m a bit surprised the ratification has not made any papers yet. Though a Presidential election and a world banking collapse certainly are taking their share of headlines; part of the reason may be that the Hague Convention was designed to prevent the kind of theft and widescale destruction which took place in World War II, as Larry Rothfield correctly points out.

As Rothfield notes:

A new and quite distinct danger has emerged in the half-century since the 1954 Convention, however. It comes not from military action, but from military inaction in the face of looting by civilians, fueled by the global market for antiquities that has boomed over the last few decades. While Hague leads the military to [focus] on avoiding harm, it imposes no requirement to actively protect cultural sites against the harm that comes from the breakdown in law and order and the concomitant surge in market-driven looting. The obligations it imposes on occupying powers, in fact, seem designed to limit the responsibility of occupiers for securing cultural property, with such responsibility applying only to “cultural property situated in occupied territory and damaged by military operations,” only when national authorities are unable to protect it, and even then only so far as possible. Since looting by civilians is not damage inflicted by military operations, Iraq’s archaeological sites are fair game and no necessary concern of the US military, which may in fact point to Hague as putting it off the hook for whatever goes wrong.

That succinctly points out the main flaws in the Hague framework. However Rothfield notes, and I wholeheartedly agree that the flaws in the Hague Convention certainly do not make ratification meaningless.

It officially adopts what had up to now been customary international law, and may help to aid and support the efforts of organizations like Blue Shield and others. Ultimately, the difficulty international treaties and lawmakers have had in regulating the rules of conflict to prevent the looting and destruction of sites may indicate how difficult it is to regulate armed conflict — and may perhaps be a powerful reason to avoid the use of force at all cost. As the Hague Testimony endorsed by heritage advocacy groups notes, adoption of the Convention “is a crucial step toward improving our foreign relations by sending a strong signal to all nations that the United States values their cultural heritage.”

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com

On the State of Cultural Heritage Sites in Georgia

Kudos to Tom Flynn for anticipating the potential cultural heritage destruction in Georgia and South Ossetia today:

…the draft of a preliminary report prepared by ICOMOS Georgia for Mr. Dinu Bumbaru, Secretary General of ICOMOS, states that, “On 7 August, ICOMOS Georgia professionals were at the village Ateni (near the town Gori) working on the 6th-century Ateni Sioni Church when shelling of the village had started. Fortunately, all the team had managed to leave the village together with other civilians without losses. Regretfully, there are casualties among our colleagues and their families working in the field of heritage preservation of Georgia.”

There are around 345 registered historical monuments and archaeological sites within the main conflict zones (Gori District, Java District, Akhalgori District, Kareli District), 53 of which are in the city of Gori itself. These include the cave city of Uplistsikhe (dating from the 1st millennium BC up to the late Middle Ages) ; the Church of Ateni Sioni (7th century architecture, 11th century murals), and Ikorta Church (12th century).

I’ve been following the media reports of the conflict there with some interest, and Flynn is the first blogger or reporter to recognize the legitimate threat to heritage in this region. Hopefully it has survived relatively-intact.

Questions or Comments? Email me at derek.fincham@gmail.com