CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VI (1) Contemporary-Eurasia-VI-1-engl | Page 64

SUBRAMANIAN KRISHNAN MANI
of the world and is not to be forgotten 2 . Buildings have tended to
express this by taking the form of towering columns, such as
London’s Monument, a giant Doric column built sixty-two and a half
meters high to commemorate the fire of London, or the Washington
Monument, an even higher column.
Memory and time as the dual essence of the monument is a broader
concept of the term than that suggested by the dictionary-a tower
structure, which in this day and age is doomed to be quickly
outreached by the next skyscraper in its vicinity. The dictionary’s
“monument” is likely to be stillborn in significance at the outset:
“erected over the grave or in a church, etc., in memory of the dead”,
like some would-be Ozymandius’ tomb.
There are different kinds of definition. Historical monuments are
considered as a cultural asset, including both the single architectonical
handmade (such as a palace, building, church, etc.) and city walls, a
garden or a whole landscape or a movable artistic evidence. Cultural
Heritage is the whole set of material documents put together in years,
that compose a city or part of it, an urban landscape or a non-built
environment, a series of evidences, etc. that are worth the conservation
and preservation. Cultural Heritage is also the set of oral and written
evidences of a population or of a single person (e.g. farmers’ culture)
that have historical interest and thus represent a document. Cultural
Heritage is the set of goods that have a high historical importance, that
are of public interest and compose the richness of a place and of that
population.
The Estonian Heritage Conservation Act defined the historical
monuments as a “movable or immovable, a part thereof, a body of
things or an integral group of structures under state prot ection which
is of historical, archaeological, ethnographic, urban developmental,
architectural, artistic or scientific value or of value in terms of
religious history or of other cultural value and due to which it is
designated as a monument pursuant to the procedure provided for in
Heritage Conservation Act”.
Franklin S. and Widdis E., “National Identity in Russian Culture: An
Introduction”, Cambridge University Press, 2 nd February, 2006, p. 171.
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