When religion, culture and tourism collide
UNESCO’s tricky balancing act between religious and secular forces
AS THE would-be guardian of the world’s most precious places and patrimony, UNESCO can hardly avoid entering into the field of religion. But given the vast and quarrelsome diversity of its member states, the UN’s educational and cultural agency finds it hard to address this sensitive subject, as some recent news stories have shown.
Among the 1,052 locations designated by UNESCO as world heritage sites—of universal value to humanity—perhaps 20% have some connection with worship. They range from cathedrals in France and Germany to mosques in Saudi Arabia. And religion (in the form of pilgrimages and processions, for example) also features among the hundreds of intangible cultural treasures that the organisation deems worthy of protection.
Once a site, or even a tradition, has been recognised by the Paris-based agency, its experts step in to offer guidance on how to allow fair access to curious outsiders while protecting vulnerable bits of heritage. These pundits have lots to say about weighing the economic interests of a tourist area’s local population against the long-term future of the site. But things get trickier when it comes to balancing the interests of secular tourists and art historians against the various groups of believers who have used a location over the centuries, and who want to go on using it. Since 2010 UNESCO has been in dispute with the authorities in Georgia over an insensitive restoration plan backed by the church, at the Kutaisi cathedral and Gelati monastery, a magnificent complex of frescoed medieval buildings. Only in the past few weeks have UNESCO consultants and Georgian state and church authorities edged towards a compromise.
Things get trickier still when several religions regard a site as holy. Perhaps the best that can be said that is that UNESCO’s rules and conventions offer the parties a language and an arena in which to have their arguments.
Last October, for example, Israel was furious after UNESCO’s executive board approved a resolution that used mainly Islamic terminology to refer to Jerusalem’s holiest peak, known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Al-Haram Al-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary. The text contained two mentions of the Western Wall, in inverted commas, and otherwise used a Muslim term for that location, the Buraq Plaza. In contrast with a previous resolution, it did acknowledge that Jerusalem and the Old City were sacred to three religions. That was seen as a minimal concession to Jewish and Christian sentiment.
Last week, Greece alleged that Turkey was violating UNESCO’s rules by allowing Koran readings and Muslim prayers, attended by members of the government, in the magnificent Istanbul landmark known as Hagia Sophia (pictured). That building has by turns been eastern Christianity’s most famous temple; then a mosque for five centuries starting in 1453; and then, under a compromise struck in the 1930s, a secular musuem where both Islamic and Christian symbols are visible. The Turkish move was an affront to to the international community, the Greek foreign ministry said.
In Russia, meanwhile, President Vladimir Putin recently cited UNESCO rules in a revealing pronouncement on one of the country’s loudest internal quarrels: about the future of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral in St Petersburg, which is in the process of being transferred from secular to church authority. The Russian president said this month that there was an issue of historic justice at stake, given the sufferings of the church under communism, but he also stressed that the state had to respect other considerations, including its UNESCO commitments and the interests of secular tourism. He seemed to be acknowledging that the church and its supporters had slightly over-reached in their enthusiasm for switching the place to clerical control.
As Erasmus was told by Alessandro Balsamo, a UNESCO official who processes new applications for world heritage status, the agency has no mandate to deal with religion as such. The World Heritage Convention aims to preserve the physical integrity of precious places for the benefit of future generations. It helps governments draw up management plans for these sensitive sites, in consultation with “all stakeholders”, a category that may include one or more religions. But UNESCO’s heritage wonks have no mandate to adjudicate between the claims of different religions.
Since 2003, UNESCO has been compiling a list of “intangible” cultural treasures—from dances to diets—which are worthy of protection. Perhaps it is no coincidence that some of UNESCO’s most interesting recent decisions have celebrated spiritual phenomena (in the broadest sense) whose ownership seems unlikely to be in dispute. In December, for example, the organisation gave world-heritage status to yoga, of which it approvingly stated:
Designed to help individuals build self-realisation, ease any suffering they may be experiencing and allow for a state of liberation, [yoga] is practised by the young and old without discriminating against gender, class or religion.
One may of course be for yoga or against it. Christians and Muslims have offered various views on this matter, as a previous Erasmus post explained. But it is a fair bet that nobody will want to start a war, diplomatic or otherwise, over whom it belongs to. As for those sensitive physical locations, UNESCO’s mandarins are right to point out that they have no remit to settle metaphysical matters that have divided countless millions of people over many centuries. Ultimately these questions will be settled by high politics, if they are settled at all. But UNESCO’s declared aim is to “contribute to peace and security” through education, science and culture. It should be floating ingenious ideas about the sharing of contentious sites even if it cannot impose them.
