The Buddha statues of Afghanistan

Though I am not very supportive of pasting posts from other blogs into this one, I opened an exception because of the relevance of the issue, which deals with the Buddha statues from Afghanistan, a bit of general knowledge for everyone.



I first heard of the Buddha statues from Afghanistan when I attended the Museum Conference in Istanbul last June/July 2010. There I was supposed to hear a speaker in charge of the museum built in the vicinity of the statues, who for security reasons was prevented from coming and was otherwise given an enthraling perspective of their work by a member of the organising committee. Later today, I finally opened the same conference newsletter and found a piece of news about these statues on UNESCO's website.



The Buddha statues of Bamiyan, in the Hazaraiat region of central Afghanistan, around 230km northwest of Kabul, were built around the 6th century AD and placed into two 2,500-metre-high niches where they stood untouched for 1.5 milennia until 2001. During the Afghanistan conflict, they were blown to pieces by the Taliban and the testimony of the region's rich Gandhara school of Buddhist art (active between the 1st and the 13th centuries) was lost in the debris.



UNESCO with Japan's s heavy sponsorship brought about a programme to preserve the Buddhas' niches, their wall paitings and also their fragments. Although there is some controvery about whether to rebuild the Buddha statues from their fragments, the most important issue is to call people and governments' attention to the protection and preservation of their material and imaterial heritage.

(video taken from the YouTube)