CONTEMPORARY EURASIA VOLUME VI (1) Contemporary-Eurasia-VI-1-engl | Page 66

SUBRAMANIAN KRISHNAN MANI
Just 345 men and women, with no dedicated resources, were tasked
with protecting historic buildings, monuments, libraries and archives
across the whole of Europe and North Africa. Most were museum
staff, art historians, scholars and university professors, yet their
success was incredible. They found and returned more than five
million stolen objects and artworks and ensured the protection of
numerous buildings, often using no more than their own ingenuity.
A part of their story is told in the film, Monuments Men, based on
author Robert Edsel’s book of the same name, by the Monuments Men
Foundation, and also in the book and ensuing film The Rape of
Europa. In 1951, the MFAA was disbanded as politicians drafted
the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in
the Event of Armed Conflict, followed by the First Protocol in 1954
and the Second Protocol in 1999 (which extended and clarified the
original tenets).
The concept of preservation when it first emerged as far back as the
19th century, was concerned mainly with the world’s historical assets.
Although the terminologies associated with preservation has varied
over the last two centuries, it evolved from the principle of
conservation espoused in the theory of Eugene Emmanuel Viollet-le-
Duc a renowned French restoration architect and writer who set up a
movement in the 1830s to restore medieval buildings and who was
also commissioned in this period to restore Notre Dame and other
important historic structures throughout Paris.
Importantly, the essential principles and the implications of
Viollet-le Duc’s movement towards conservation in terms of “defining
the history of a building and returning it to its original character” 3 , has
basically remained unchanged. However, a further evolution of this
concept occurred with the development of scientific methods and its
influence on historic research. As such, historic accuracy and authen-
ticity then became an ideal and this notion was further strengthened
when the League of Nations established the International Institute for
Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC). Among the bureaus of the IIIC, was
the International Office of Museum (IOM) which was responsible for
Iser Yudhishthir Raj, ed. “The Challenge to Our Cultural Heritage: Why
Preserve the Past?”, Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, 1986.
3
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