St Petersburg Hermitage Museum ready to help Palmyra’s restoration

MOSCOW, December 14. /TASS/. The State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg is collecting material to help the restoration of UNESCO world heritage sites destroyed by Islamic State terrorists in the Syrian city of Palmyra, the museum’s director said on Monday. "Currently we are gathering the documents and materials dedicated to the monuments," Mikhail Piotrovsky told the Rossiya-24 TV channel. "When everything calms down, they will have to reconstruct the sites as we did with the destroyed suburbs of St. Petersburg." The Palmyra collection of the Hermitage museum comprises ten burial relief pieces, sculpture fragments, a stone slab of the world’s first tax law, dating back to 136 AD, and some coins. According to Piotrovsky, an exhibition of the showpieces from Palmyra may be organized. Palmyra, located in the Syrian Desert between Damascus and the Euphrates, was one of the richest cities of antiquity. Tradition suggests that is was founded by the biblical King Solomon. The remains of its once majestic temples and buildings were declared UNESCO world cultural heritage sites in 1980. Islamic State militants who seized Palmyra on May 20 destroyed several most ancient monuments, including the 2,000-year old statue of the Lion of al-Lat, the temple of Baal Shamin built during the Roman rule in the 1st century AD, and the temple of Bel, the largest edifice on the compound that was erected during the reign of Emperor Tiberius in 32 AD. The terrorists also beheaded the 80-year-old Dr. Haled al-Asaad, one of the most famous Syrian archeologists who devoted his whole life to the studies of Palmyra heritage. Read more