Plans are being made for the rehabilitation of the traditional Syrian metropolis of Palmyra, together with the UNESCO website’s museum and its artefacts, following the primary complete worldwide assembly on the subject because the fall of former president Bashar Al Assad’s regime in 2024.
A convention, organised by UNESCO and the heritage charity Aliph in Switzerland final week, introduced collectively worldwide heritage specialists, antiquities officers and members of the Syrian neighborhood for the primary time since 2019. The group has since issued suggestions, together with the launch of a world professional process power to work in direction of the elimination of Palmyra from the UNESCO Checklist of World Heritage in Hazard.
Valery Freland, the manager director of Aliph, advised The Artwork Newspaper that the convention confirmed the worldwide neighborhood to be “absolutely mobilised” behind these plans. “We’re able to work in three key instructions,” he defined. “Rehabilitation of the Palmyra museum, which was broken and looted by [Isis] and civil conflict shelling; the restoration of artefacts [currently] in safekeeping on the Damascus Museum; and the restore of the foot bridge resulting in the location.”
Freland hopes to start work on these missions in January 2026, when his crew will search for an operator for the museum.
Plans for the way forward for the museum will contain the local people
Palmyra Nationwide Museum, September 2025 © Michel Chaloub
Different suggestions issued by the Syrian Directorate Common of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) following the convention embrace the pressing stabilisation of the museum’s assortment and high-priority monuments, and consolidating archaeological knowledge. Plans can even be made to contain native communities by way of coaching applications and workshops.
Freland stated: “Palmyra was a cultural crossroads and is a logo of intercultural dialogue and resilience. Its rehabilitation will give hope to the folks of Palmyra.”
In 2015, Isis destroyed necessary landmarks at Palmyra such because the Temple of Bel, Temple of Baalshamin, Arch of Triumph and columns within the Valley of the Tombs. After being quickly taken again by Assad’s military in March 2016, the terrorist group recaptured the town within the following December and inflicted additional injury. Conversations relating to the rebuilding of the town have grown because the finish of Assad’s regime and the following lifting of worldwide sanctions.
Nonetheless, the rehabilitation of the traditional metropolis of Palmyra, and the rebuilding of its relationship to the close by fashionable metropolis of the identical identify, current many challenges. David Sassine, an Aliph venture supervisor who undertook a latest website go to to the realm, says these challenges embrace “restricted safety and entry, the presence of unexploded ordnance, and gaps in documentation ensuing from years of battle”.
He provides: “The connection between the traditional website and the fashionable metropolis was once dynamic and economically useful. In the present day, each the archaeological website and the close by city space require main rehabilitation to get better and reestablish this connection.”
This sentiment was echoed within the convention’s opening remarks by Lina Kutiefan, the deputy director of DGAM. Addressing colleagues from the Palmyra Museum, in addition to Syrian heritage specialists and representatives from the Louvre Museum and educational establishments, she spoke of an pressing want to start small rehabilitation pilot tasks on the 200-acre website.
She went on to acknowledge website administration challenges, together with a scarcity of electrical energy and clear ingesting water. In later discussions, these points have been described as intrinsically linking the plight of the ruins of Palmyra with that of native folks folks, who might all profit—as soon as correct infrastructure is in place—from a return to cultural and environmental tourism.
Throughout a panel on neighborhood involvement, Hasan Ali, the director of the Palmyra Museum, additionally spoke of the native connection to the location. Referencing the third-century queen of Syria’s Palmyrene Empire, he stated: “Everybody in Palmyra has a daughter named Zenobia.” He additionally likened the museum’s former head of antiquities, Khaled al-Asaad, killed by Isis in 2015 for refusing to disclose the situation of hidden antiquities, to the traditional queen, who has lengthy been seen as a logo for the defence of Syrian heritage.
A Syrian lady in attendance on the occasion spoke of her cousin, who returned to his hometown of Palmyra following the autumn of the Assad regime after years of exile in Europe. “As a substitute of going to his home,” the girl recounted, “he went straight to the ruins.”
