World Cultural Heritage
What is the purpose of cultural heritage?

UNESCO’s central objective is to draw attention to the value cultural heritage and work to preserve it. The world’s cultural heritage sites are intended to be places of learning that raise awareness of cultural identity. The undesired flipside of this recognition can be destruction by mass tourism and cultural vandalism. 

By Nadine Berghausen

Social media has seen the rise of bucket lists, a list of everything a person wants to see or experience in life. They often include travel destinations. How, though, can people decide what destinations are particularly worth seeing and identify the best cities to visit, national parks to explore, and monuments to admire? Many consult the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List, which is often seen as a quality seal and a ready-made list of places to experience culture that is important and significant.
 
Social media platforms like Instagram clearly illustrate the upside and the downside of this approach. Users frequently post pictures of World Cultural Heritage sites that are barely visible behind crowds of fellow visitors. The ancient city of Ephesus in the Aegean Sea region loses its charm when swarms of tourists with colourful parasols block the view. In Venice, St. Mark's Square teems with tourists and the Bridge of Sighs groans under their combined weight, while incoming cruise ships threaten to tip the ecological balance of the lagoon. The ancient city of Ephesus flourished in the Aegeatic Region during the Classical Greek era. Today it is both the largest and most visited site of ancient ruins in the world. | Photo: © picture alliance/ Jens Kalaene/ dpa-Zentralbild/dpa

History and cultural identity

Drawn by their World Cultural Heritage status, masses of visitors flooding sites can have a negative impact on both the place and the people who live there. This was certainly not what the World Cultural Heritage Committee intended. UNESCO has fought to have cultural heritage sites places of learning worth protecting, and to preserve their exceptional value for generations to come. Tourism is primarily seen as a plus, because it pumps money into the local economy, adding to a state’s incentive for preserving its cultural heritage.
 
All of the nearly 200 countries that have signed the UNESCO World Heritage Convention to date agree on the importance of preserving cultural heritage. Such sites help create identity, as they are testimonies to the culture and history of a society or place. Some World Heritage sites were already world-famous before their designation, while the importance of other cultural assets was fairly unknown until UNESCO called attention to them. This is especially true for intangible cultural heritage, highlighted the 900-year-old Ötztal dialect in Austria, in example. This dialect is regarded as the most formative element of local identity, but most visitors to Tyrol were likely to have been previously unaware of this living tradition.

Cultural heritage as a political issue

The significance of cultural heritage for social or religious identity can also make it a target for destruction. Opposing parties in a political or religious conflict often try to wipe out the cultural heritage of the other side in an attempt to damage their cultural identity. The destruction of the ancient oasis city of Palmyra in the Syrian civil war by the terrorist militia of the so-called "Islamic State", which deemed it "un-Islamic", is just one example. The demonstrative shelling of the Stari Most Bridge - the landmark of the city of Mostar that not only connected the Croatian and Serbian parts of the city, but also represented a symbolic bridge between East and West - in the 1993 Bosnian war was also a by-product of political conflicts that had no mercy on cultural assets. These events are not necessarily directly related to the cultural heritage designation; after all, cultural sites were victims of political conflicts long before UNESCO was founded, but it can reinforce their value as objects to be destroyed. Ruins in Syrian Palmyra. | Photo (detail): © picture alliance /dpa/ Mikhail Voskresenskiy The cultural heritage designation can also be used as a political instrument to protect cultural assets in conflicts - and thereby trigger new conflicts. Israel, for example, reacted with indignation to the nomination of the Old City of Hebron as a World Heritage site. The city of Hebron has been divided into two parts since 1998, one controlled by the Palestinian Authority, the other by Israel. Both parties have battled over the Old City because it is home to the Ibrahimi Mosque, which is a spiritually important place for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. In 2017, the Palestinian Authority had demanded special protection status for its part of Hebron in an emergency application because it saw the Old City increasingly being destroyed by Jewish settlers. When it was announced that Hebron was to be included on the World Heritage List, the Old City was designated an "Islamic city" by UNESCO - which Israel took as a serious affront. The country left UNESCO at the end of 2018, together with the USA. The interior of the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron in the West Bank. The Isreali government took the designation of Hebron as an “Islamic city” as an affront. | Photo: © picture alliance/ Stefanie Järkel/ dpa