Syrian War Takes Heavy Toll at a Crossroad of Cultures

PALMYRA, Syria — The imposing stone colonnades still stand, below stark hills dotted with tombs. They still glow peach-pink in the afternoon sun, impassive, as if unimpressed by what is, after all, not their first war.

At the first-century Temple of Bel, one of the best-preserved buildings in the ancient city of Palmyra, a prominent column bears a new scar. A mortar shell left a telltale splash mark on the stone, without budging a structure that has stood for 2,000 years. Elsewhere, two other columns have collapsed, officials said, and bullets have pockmarked walls. But compared with the wholesale destruction that was feared, the damage, for now, is minimal.

Yet the war has left deeper, less obvious wounds. Illegal digging, long a problem at the many sprawling archaeological sites in Syria, has accelerated during three years of conflict. Grave robbers, some crude, others professional, have stolen numerous objects from Palmyra’s tombs, museum officials say, sometimes sawing funeral friezes in two to make them easier to carry.

Another casualty is the town of Tadmur, a jumble of concrete skirting the skeleton of the grander ancient city. Its tourist economy has shut down. And for local people, who consider themselves custodians of one of the world’s most magnificent ancient sites, there is a greater, if less tangible, pain.

They yearn for the days when Palmyra showed visitors from around the globe a vision of Syria that transcended the region’s modern-day strife, as a crossroad of Greek, Roman, Persian and Islamic cultures. Archaeologists who worked among the ruins, now closed under military guard, still draw salaries. But they live bereft of an experience that had filled their days with beauty and meaning: excavating at dawn as the sunrise slowly lit the stones with gold.

“I feel as if I’m dead,” said Khalil al-Hariri, an archaeologist and the director of the Palmyra Museum, near the ruins. He spends his time waiting for government permission to resume his early-morning explorations, and worrying about the plundering, which he says is “destroying culture, destroying civilization.”

Officials at Unesco, the United Nations agency that works to protect historic places, have classified as endangered all six of Syria’s World Heritage sites, including Palmyra. But conflict keeps them from assessing the damage in person. In recent weeks, as the government consolidated control of the desert highway to Tadmur from the city of Homs, it allowed journalists to visit, among the first outsiders to arrive since armed revolt spread to the region in late 2011.

Nada al-Hassan, chief of Unesco’s Arab states unit, said the biggest danger to Palmyra and other more remote sites was illegal digging by armed “international mafias” and, officials suspect, by insurgent and government fighters. She said that Unesco was working with Interpol, ordinary Syrians and the “committed, technocratic” staff of the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums of Syria to track damage and recover stolen artifacts.

Officials have intercepted hundreds of smuggled Syrian antiquities in Beirut, Lebanon, including dozens from Palmyra, and Unesco is looking into Syrian government claims on a cache of medieval Islamic coins proposed for sale at Sotheby’s, Ms. Hassan said. But the United Nations Security Council has yet to act on Unesco’s recommendation to ban all trade in Syrian artifacts, as it did with those from Iraq during the war there.

“Now is not the time to sell Syrian objects,” Ms. Hassan said. “Anything Syrian that is being sold now is suspicious.”

Syria’s 32 archaeological museums have packed away their collections, but objects have been looted from at least three. In Raqqa, controlled by foreign-led Islamist groups, some objects appear to have been destroyed out of religious objections to their pagan provenance or depiction of living creatures, said Ahmad Deeb, the director of museums at the Ministry of Culture.

Antiquities have sometimes fared better in areas under the control of local Syrian insurgents, who are more likely to understand and value them, officials said. (One Bedouin insurgent who grew up in Palmyra’s ruins, tending camels, said he and his comrades left town to avoid damaging them.) And in Maarat al-Noaman, where rebels occupy a museum full of renowned mosaics, Ms. Hassan said, the government pays the fighters to preserve them.

“There are all sorts of deals,” she said.

Temples have stood in Palmyra for thousands of years, and human habitation dates back much further. Successive civilizations included the brief third-century rule of Queen Zenobia, who revolted against the Romans. Many residents, including Muslims, see that history as continuous with their own.

“Inside us there is something very ancient and old,” said Sheikh Ahmed Dagher Abu Ali, a member of Parliament, leading visitors through the otherwise empty museum to admire statues of Palmyra’s female deity Allat and her Greek equivalent Athena. Protecting that heritage from extremist insurgents less than 20 miles to the east is “on our shoulders,” he added. “We are responsible on behalf of all the world’s civilizations.”

Now the Bedouins and camels are gone, the ruins empty but for soldiers perched on the stones, smoking cigarettes. In the museum, a security official in an unmarked army-green uniform sat silently at the desk of the director, Mr. Hariri, who sat to the side.

Mr. Hariri showed off four first-century sculptures recently confiscated from thieves. Next, he pointed to friezes of bejeweled women hanging on the wall, his favorites, he said. Asked why, he answered, “Because they are beautiful.”