Afghanistan: the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan 20 years ago
Audio 02:29
The cliff with the Buddhas of Bamiyan, in Afghanistan.
The Guimet museum in Paris, but also the Louvre in Lens commemorate the destruction of the Buddhas with two exhibitions offered to the public as soon as the museums reopen.
SHAH MARAI / AFP
By: Sophie Torlotin Follow
6 mins
Twenty years ago in Afghanistan, six months before the attack on the World Trade Center, the Taliban dynamited and filmed the collapse of two stone giants.
The monumental Buddhas carved into the cliff of Bamiyan and more than 15 centuries old disappeared on the grounds that all human representation is prohibited by Islamic doctrine.
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At an altitude of 2,500 m, in Afghanistan, the Bamiyan cliff is part of a grandiose landscape at the crossroads of worlds between India, Iran and Central Asia.
Bamiyan is the capital of the country of the Hazaras, a Shiite community, located on a Buddhist monastic site unique in the world where until March 2001 stood two giant Buddhas 38 and 55 m high
blown up by the Taliban.
“
You have to imagine this very long cliff of Bamiyan, in which 700 caves are dug which are hermitages.
It was a place of retreat for the monks, for the faithful.
These two monumental effigies modeled directly in loess, a sediment
,
were built there in the 6th and 7th centuries,
”says Sophie Makariou, president of the National Museum of Asian Arts in Paris.
Then to add: “
They were gilded with the leaf, they were in fact draped in a kind of toga;
an antique drape since this art of this region of Afghanistan, this area of Gandhara, is a so-called “Greco-Buddhist” art.
It is also very upsetting, because in Bamiyan something is being played which is the meeting of civilizations,
”she says.
► Also to listen: The second life of monuments: the Buddhas of Afghanistan
"There is nothing more present than the void"
The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas made it possible to recognize the attack on the heritage and the memory of men as a crime against humanity.
The artist Pascal Convert went there in 2016 and made recordings of the disfigured cliff.
Thousands of photographic surveys and 3D scans, form a monumental and panoramic photographic work of the cliff.
“
Despite the absence of the Buddhas, they are present.
They are not specters or ghosts at all, they are present.
Their height, their location, precisely this kind of strangeness of these two empty monuments…
”, argues Pascal Convert.
Then to add: “
There is an obvious connection between the two Buddhas of Bamiyan and the Twin Towers in New York, the two giants of two opposite continents.
When you see the 9/11 monument which is in fact the reverse volume of the towers which form an infinite well in which water flows like tears, over there it is the same thing, we have a very great presence .
There is nothing more present than the void.
"
The pulverized Bamiyan Buddhas will probably never be rebuilt.
The efforts today are focused on the consolidation of the cliff and more particularly of the niches which have suffered greatly from the Taliban bombardments, and on a hope of the search for a third Buddha, a reclining Buddha who would be in the valley, perhaps. to be buried.
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