Zabid is one of the oldest towns in Yemen and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993.
The Great Mosque of Zabid was built in 628 AD and the town was the capital of Yemen from 13th to the 15th century.
Zabid is under rebel control of Huthi rebels, which are backed by Iran. The government, backed by Saudi Arabia, has been closing in on it as it makes its way to Hodeida, an important port.
Zabid is under threat as the government military looms in on Huthi rebels.
During the Nazi occupation of France in World War II, the co-operating Vichy government ordered the removal and destruction of all metal monuments and statues for the purpose of remelting, unless considered to be of “historical or artistic interest” to the new regime. In other words, sculptures that symbolised democracy, liberal policies, progression, the avant-garde and generally anything that might have offended the Germans, was deemed “ugly” and radical and sent straight to a hellish grave of twisted metal and fallen statues.
Throughout France during the Second World War, 17,000 statues, both commemorative and decorative, disappeared.
Source: MessyNessyChic.
The Great Mosque of al-Nuri was a mosque in Mosul, Iraq, famous for its leaning minaret. Tradition holds that the mosque was first built in the late 12th century, although it underwent many renovations over the years. Outlasting various hostile invading forces in its history of 850 years, the mosque was blown up as well as the cylindrical portion of the minaret, which collapsed on 21 June 2017, during the Battle of Mosul.
The Great Mosque in 1932.
In 2013.
In 2017.
Mada’in Saleh is an archaeological site located in Saudi Arabia. A majority of the vestiges date from the Nabatean kingdom (1st century AD).
Following the discovery of Petra by the Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt in 1812, Charles Montagu Doughty, an English traveler, heard of a similar site near Mada’in Saleh, a fortified Ottoman town on the Hajj road from Damascus and reached the site of the ruins in 1876.
Hatra may have been built by the Assyrians or by the Achaemenid Empire, or possibly in the 3rd or 2nd century BC under the influence of the Seleucid Empire, but there is no reliable information on the city before the Parthian period. The city flourished during the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, as a religious and trading center.Later on, the city became the capital of possibly the first Arab Kingdom.
Below: Hatra in 1911.
The Ross Errilly Friary is a medieval Franciscan friary located about a mile to the northwest of Headford, County Galway, Ireland. It is a National Monument of Ireland and among the best-preserved medieval monastic sites in the country.
1460: This is the most likely date that Ross Errilly friary was founded in.
1472-1474: Lady Nuala O’Donnell, mother of Red Hugh O’Donnell (d.1505) is said to have gone in person to a Chapter taking place in the friary of Ross, to appeal for the establishment of a Franciscan friary in Donegal.
1469: The earliest contemporary reference to Ross Errilly friary occurred when John Blake, a Galway citizen, bequeathed forty pence to the friary of Ross.
1496: The will of a Galway merchant, John Lynch, made a bequest to the friary of Ross.
1540: The friary was official dissolved during the general suppression of monasteries.
View more information HERE.
by Peter Laszlo Peri (1899-1967).
Two dirty and dilapidated concrete figures of naked sunbathers which lay mouldering in the corner of a hotel garden have been identified as an important, presumed lost sculpture from the 1951 Festival of Britain.
Peter Laszlo Peri’s The Sunbathers was on the wall of an entrance to Waterloo station for the festival, an attempt by the Labour government bring cheer to the country after the second world war.
But, like dozens of artworks commissioned for the event, little has been known of what happened next. Was it sold? Was it destroyed?
View full article HERE.
The Waldo Hotel in Clarksburg, West Virginia, USA, was built from 1901 to 1904 by Congressman and Senator Nathan Goff, Jr. who hired American architect Harrison Albright, best known for his innovative design of the West Baden Springs Hotel in Orange County, Indiana, to design it. The hotel was once the social center of Clarksburg. In its days it was a gathering place for parties, weddings, civic meetings and social events. It was one of the state’s most luxurious hotels.
The Waldo Hotel in 1914 (photo below).
Inside the crumbling medieval church of San Francesco di Visso, the “blue helmets” of the art world are racing to save a masterpiece damaged in Italy’s devastating earthquake last year.
The Domus Aurea (“Golden House”, in Latin) was a vast palace built by the Emperor Nero in the heart of ancient Rome after the great fire in 64 AD which destroyed a large part of the city.
The 300-room structure, now mostly underground, takes its name from the gold leaf that once covered many of its walls.
Ancient cave paintings about 8,000 years old at a world heritage site in the Sahara desert have been defaced with graffiti.
Vandals scrawled their names on top of the artworks in French and Arabic.
View full article HERE.
Leptis Magna was a prominent city in Roman Libya.
Little is known about the old city, but it appears to have been powerful enough to repel Dorieus’ attempt to establish a Greek colony nearby in c. 515 BC. A 4th to 3rd century BC necropolis was found under the Roman theatre.
Leptis Magna remained as such until the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when the city and the surrounding area were formally incorporated into the empire as part of the province of Africa. It soon became one of the leading cities of Roman Africa and a major trading post.
In c. 647 due to an Arab invasionthe city was mostly abandoned except for a Byzantine garrison force and a population of less than 1,000 inhabitants. Under Arab domination Leptis disappeared: by the 10th century the city was forgotten and fully covered by sand.
Volubilis is a partly excavated Roman city in Morocco, commonly considered as the ancient capital of the kingdom of Mauretania.
It developed from the 3rd century BC onward as an Amazigh, then proto-Carthaginian, settlement before being the capital of the kingdom of Mauretania. It grew rapidly under Roman rule from the 1st century AD and gained a number of major public buildings in the 2nd century, including a basilica, temple and triumphal arch.
Archaeologists have found two Pharaonic statues dating back more than 3,000 years in a muddy pit in a Cairo suburb.
The statues, discovered on Thursday on wasteland between crumbling apartment blocks, are thought to represent pharaohs from the 19th dynasty, which ruled from 1314 to 1200 BCE.
Full article HERE.
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