During UNESCO’s 46th session in New Delhi, several sites were recognized as World Heritage Sites, highlighting their cultural significance and complex histories.
The Appian Way
The Appian Way, the ancient Romans’ first highway and a tourist attraction in modern Rome, has been added to the United Nations’ cultural heritage list.
Known as the Regina Viarum or Queen of Roads, it connected the capital of the early Roman state to the southeastern town of Brindisi. It is the 60th Italian site to be recognized by the U.N. culture agency UNESCO, which announced its decision on the social platform X on Saturday.
The road is named after Appius Claudius Caecus, the Roman censor who
began and completed the first section as a military road to the south in 312 BC.
Culture Minister Gennaro Sangiuliano said the move acknowledged the “universal value of an extraordinary work of engineering that has been essential for centuries for commercial, social and cultural exchanges with the Mediterranean and the East.”
Schwerin Castle is reflected in a puddle in Schwerin, Germany, July 27, 2024. (AP Photo)
Germany’s Schwerin Castle
The committee has designated the Schwerin Residence Ensemble in the north-eastern German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern as a World Heritage Site.
The ensemble includes Schwerin Castle and parts of the historic city center, which remarkably survived World War II without any bomb damage.
The much older core of Schwerin Castle received its present style of Romantic historicism only in the mid-19th century, and it is now a popular tourist attraction.
It has also been featured in films such as “Kingsman: The Golden Circle” starring Colin Firth and Julianne Moore.
Today, the castle is used in East Germany as a training center for kindergarten teachers, houses a museum and is the state Parliament seat.
The idea of placing Schwerin on the World Heritage list is over 20 years old.
In Germany, there are more than 50 World Heritage sites.
“Doyu-no-warito,” a symbol of the Sado gold mine complex, is seen in Sado, Niigata prefecture, Japan, March 12, 2023. (AP Photo)
Japan’s Sado gold mine
Japan’s controversial Sado gold mine was registered as a cultural heritage site after the country agreed to include it in an exhibit of its dark history of abusing Korean laborers during World War II.
The decision signals an improvement in ties between Tokyo and Seoul.
The mine on an island off the coast of Niigata in northern Japan operated for nearly 400 years and was once the world’s largest gold producer before closing in 1989. It was also linked to Japan’s wartime abuse of Korean laborers.
Committee members, including South Korea, supported the listing unanimously at Saturday’s annual meeting in New Delhi, India. They said Japan provided additional information, made all necessary amendments to the plan, and consulted with South Korea over the mine’s wartime history.
The Japanese delegate told the meeting that Japan has installed new exhibition material “to explain the severe conditions of (Korean laborers’) work and remember their hardship.”
Japan acknowledged that Koreans were put to more dangerous tasks in the mine shaft, which caused some to die. Many of them were also given meager food rations and nearly no days off.
Japanese officials said that a memorial service for all the Sado Island gold mine workers will be held annually at the site.
Japan’s Foreign Minister Yoko Kamikawa said in a statement that she was “truly delighted” by Sado island’s designation, underscoring its “extraordinary value as an exceptional cultural heritage.” But the minister avoided referring to the mine’s history.
The South Korean delegation said the country expects Japan to keep its pledge to be truthful to history and to show “both the bright and dark side” of the Sado mine, which would help improve relations over the long term.
In Seoul, South Korea’s foreign ministry called on Japan to continue living up to its promises on the mine and take additional steps to sustain the momentum in improving bilateral ties.
Japan had to demonstrate a commitment to face its wartime atrocities to gain support from South Korea, which had opposed the UNESCO bid because of the wartime abuse of Korean laborers. Such disputes over history have consistently strained bilateral ties. Seoul has said some Koreans brought to Japan during its 1910-1945 colonization of the Korean Peninsula were put to forced labor at the mine.
Historians say Japan used hundreds of thousands of Korean laborers, including those forcibly brought from the Korean Peninsula, at Japanese mines and factories to make up for labor shortages, as most working-age men were sent to battlefronts across Asia and the Pacific. Sado was among them.
Japan’s government has long been criticized for its reluctance to discuss wartime atrocities, including the sexual abuse of Asian women known as “comfort women” and Korean forced laborers.
Japanese authorities have hailed the Sado Island mine for advancements in mining technology before and after industrialization but made no mention of its connection to the abuse of Korean laborers during World War II.
A worker walks on scaffolding at the archaeological site of the Saint Hilarion Monastery in Tell Umm al-Amr close to Deir al-Balah, in the central Gaza Strip, Palestine, March 19, 2013. (AFP Photo)
Gaza’s St. Hilarion Monastery
St. Hilarion Monastery in central Gaza has been added to the World Heritage in Danger list.
“This achievement was made during the 46th session of the World Heritage Committee of UNESCO, held in New Delhi, India,” Palestinian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities Hani al-Hayek said in a statement published by his office.
Al-Hayek praised UNESCO’s emergency decision to list the site, describing it as an integral part of the exceptional Palestinian heritage with significant human value.
“This action is part of the Palestinian leadership’s efforts to preserve Gaza’s cultural heritage amid the brutal war and genocide faced by our people,” he added.
Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas welcomed the U.N. committee’s decision, calling it a “very important decision given the ongoing Israeli genocidal war on the Strip and evidence to the authenticity and history of the Palestinian people.”
In a statement reported by Palestine’s official news agency WAFA, Abbas said: “The State of Palestine will continue to protect this unique site for humanity as a whole.”
St. Hilarion Monastery, dating back to the Byzantine era, is one of the largest and oldest monasteries in Palestine and the Middle East.
The Israeli military has destroyed approximately 206 archaeological and heritage sites since the beginning of the Israeli war on the Gaza Strip, according to the Gaza Media Office.
Dunes dotted with dazzling pools
Brazil’s Lencois Maranhenses National Park, famed for its white dunes that fill with blue and emerald lagoons in the rainy season, was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The vast park, named for the dunes’ resemblance to a bedsheet spread across the landscape – “lencois” means sheets in Portuguese – is located in the northeastern state of Maranhao, in a transition zone between the Amazon, Cerrado and Caatinga biomes.
Lencois Maranhenses is the 24th site in Brazil to be listed as a place of significant cultural or natural significance.
The national park was created in June 1981 and covers an area of 156,000 hectares. More than half of it offers a landscape of dunes and multi-colored lagoons, attracting more than 100,000 tourists each year.
According to UNESCO, it is South America’s largest expanse of dunes.
The Lencois Maranhenses are a protected area “where the desert meets the sea, creating a unique landscape,” Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva said in a letter sent in early 2023 to UNESCO to urge the site’s inscription as a World Heritage Site.
The park has also hosted several Hollywood film shoots.
Marquesas Islands
The Marquesas Islands in French Polynesia have been added to the World Heritage classification.
“New inscription on the UNESCO World Heritage List: Te Henua Enata – The Marquesas Islands,” the organization posted on X, using the archipelago’s Indigenous name meaning “The Land of Men.”
Located in the Pacific around 5,500 miles northeast of New Zealand, the Marquesas offers “exceptional testimony” of “a human civilization that arrived by sea around the year 1000 C.E. and developed on these isolated islands between the 10th and the 19th Centuries,” UNESCO said on its website.
But they are seen by the cultural body as a mixed site equally precious as “a hotspot of biodiversity that combines irreplaceable and exceptionally well-conserved marine and terrestrial ecosystems.”
The islands host “rare and diverse flora, a diversity of emblematic marine species, and one of the most diverse seabird assemblages in the South Pacific,” with waters “virtually free from human exploitation,” UNESCO added.
Moravian Church settlements
The United Nations specialized cultural agency has extended its recognition of the Moravian Church Settlements worldwide to include sites in Germany, the United States, and Northern Ireland.
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) on Friday designated the settlements of Herrnhut in Saxony in eastern Germany, Bethlehem in Pennsylvania in the United States and Gracehill outside Ballymena in Northern Ireland as World Heritage Sites.
Christiansfeld in Denmark was already listed as a World Heritage Site in 2015.
All three settlements were established in the 18th century by refugees of one of the oldest Protestant denominations. The Moravian Church has its roots in the 15th-century Bohemian Reformation in what is now the Czech Republic, some 60 years before Martin Luther’s Reformation.
“Each settlement has its own architectural character based on ideals of the Moravian Church but adapted to local conditions,” UNESCO stated on its website.
“Together, they represent the transnational scope and consistency of the international Moravian community as a global network. An active congregation is present in each component part, where traditions are continued and constitute a living Moravian heritage.”
Moidam royal burial mounds
The Charaideo Moidam royal burial complex and shrines, built by northeast India’s Ahom dynasty, have been inscribed as a new World Heritage Site.
The Charaideo Moidams, located in Assam state, is a mound burial system that was a resting place for Ahom kings and queens. They were constructed by covering an earth over a hollow vault made of bricks, stone, or earth.
The designated site contains 90 moidams of different sizes, which were created over 600 years, and include other cultural features like ceremonial pathways and bodies of water, said a spokesperson from ICOMOS, the advisory body of the World Heritage Committee.
“The moidams are an exceptional example of an Ahom necropolis that represents funeral traditions and associated beliefs tangibly,” they added.
According to the U.N. Cultural Agency’s website, the Ahom clan established their capital in different parts of the Brahmaputra River Valley between the 12th and 18th centuries after migrating from China. They established the first capital at the Patkai hills in eastern India and named it Charaideo, which means “a dazzling city above the mountain” in their language. Even though the clan moved across cities, the burial site they built was seen as the most sacred place for the departed souls of the royals.
Experts say the shrines showcase the architecture and expertise of Assam’s masons, comparing them to the royal tombs of China and the pyramids of the Egyptian Pharaohs.
The site has the largest concentration of these vaulted mound burials, according to UNESCO, and reflects the sculpted landscape of the surrounding hills.
Apartheid massacre site
UNESCO added the scene of an apartheid-era massacre and a village where Nelson Mandela lived as a boy to its World Heritage List in an entry honoring South Africa’s struggle that ended white-minority rule 30 years ago.
The new listing includes 14 locations across South Africa grouped by UNESCO as “Human Rights, Liberation and Reconciliation: Nelson Mandela Legacy Sites.”
They include the scene of the 1960 Sharpeville massacre when police shot dead 69 black protestors, including children, in a turning point in the struggle that led the apartheid government to ban the African National Congress (ANC) that now governs.
Also on the list is the University of Fort Hare in the Eastern Cape province where anti-apartheid figurehead Mandela studied and the remote village of Mqhekezweni where he said in his autobiography, “Long Walk to Freedom”, that his political activism was first stirred.
Stonehenge not ‘in danger’
The U.N. cultural agency UNESCO has rejected recommendations to place Stonehenge on its world heritage “in danger” list over the U.K.’s plans to build a nearby road tunnel.
The organization’s World Heritage Committee (WHC) published a draft decision last month to add the prehistoric monument in Wiltshire to the list, which supports international assistance on threatened sites.
The tunnel project, aimed at easing pressure on the A303 motorway, has sparked lengthy legal battles over concerns it will destroy the landscape and archaeological artifacts in the surrounding area.
But at a meeting in New Delhi, the committee voted for an amendment to the draft decision, which said the impacts of the tunnel development do not constitute including the monument on the “in danger” list.
The amendment, put forward by the Kenya delegation, said Britain’s plans to mitigate the effect the tunnel would have on the site and the surrounding landscape are sufficient.
It said the WHC “recognizes that proposed design developments offer enhanced mitigation of the impacts on the integrity of the property and that the impacts of the proposed open 0.7 kilometer cutting at the Western Portal do not constitute sufficient ascertained or potential danger to warrant inclusion on the List of World Heritage in Danger.”
Debates over the draft recommendation lasted for more than an hour-and-a-half during the WHC session, it is understood.
Campaign group Stonehenge Alliance said it was “shocked” by the vote and described the amendment as “highly damaging and inaccurate.”
The group called on the new Labour Government to distance itself from what it called “misleading briefings and political maneuverings” at the New Delhi session.
The PA news agency understands that the Department for Transport is reviewing all major road projects, including the A303 tunnel, and will provide updates as needed.
Tom Holland, president of the campaign group, called the vote a “travesty of justice.”
Stonehenge was built in stages on the flat lands of Salisbury Plain in southern England, starting 5,000 years ago. The unique stone circle was erected in the late Neolithic period about 2,500 B.C.
The site, along with Avebury, was declared by UNESCO to be a world heritage site of outstanding universal value in 1986 on account of the size of the megaliths, the sophistication of their concentric plans and the complexes of neolithic and bronze age sites and monuments.
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