A heritage that belongs to the world

By Nikki Babri

The Golestan Palace has stood at the center of Tehran for over four centuries, its mirrored halls and glass-mosaic walls outlasting every upheaval the city has seen. Touraj Daryaee, director of UC Irvine’s Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture, has visited it many times throughout his career and calls it “the Versailles of Iran.” This past March, a strike damaged it.

Iran contains some of the world’s richest concentrations of historic architecture and urban heritage. Many of its monuments have survived thousands of years of conflicts, but modern warfare poses a different kind of threat. Since the U.S. and Israel began bombing Iran on February 28th, more than 130 cultural heritage sites have sustained damage alongside thousands of devastating civilian casualties. For scholars of Iranian civilization, the destruction of both brings with it a compounded grief. 

UCI’s Samuel M. Jordan Center for Persian Studies and Culture is home to one of the nation’s most distinguished programs in the field. In 2025, the Jordan Center became the new home of the Encyclopædia Iranica – the most comprehensive scholarly resource on Iranian civilization in the world. Daryaee, professor of history and UCI Maseeh Chair in Persian Studies, was appointed its editor-in-chief. The Center’s faculty have spent their careers researching a civilization that stretches back more than three millennia, with deep ties to the country’s scholars, archives and sites. The war has made all of that harder, and has given them an intimate understanding of what is at stake.

A civilization that has survived everything

History has taught us that Iran is not a place that lacks experience with destruction. Alexander the Great burned Persepolis. The Mongols swept through the Iranian Highlands in the thirteenth century. Invasions, foreign interference and revolution each left its mark, “but none of these events could destroy everything,” explains Carlo G. Cereti, professor of classics and religion, and the UCI Ferdowsi Presidential Chair in Zoroastrian Studies.

What has changed, he says, is the nature of the weapons. Throughout most of history, monuments were repurposed, abandoned or stripped for building materials, but rarely erased outright. A rocket is a different kind of force. “They’ve never been completely annihilated,” Cereti says. “Today’s war, not only in Iran but in Lebanon and Syria, is more powerful. The risk is that at some point there may be nothing to be saved. Something will be lost forever.”

Several of Iran’s 29 UNESCO World Heritage Sites have now sustained damage. UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, designates these sites for their “outstanding value to humanity,” a distinction shared with the likes of the Egyptian pyramids, the Acropolis and the Great Wall of China.

UNESCO has verified damage to Tehran’s Golestan Palace, the former ceremonial residence of the Qajar dynasty; Isfahan’s 17th-century Chehel Sotoun palace, built during the height of the Safavid empire; and the Masjed-e Jame, Iran’s oldest Friday mosque. There are also reports of damage near the Khorramabad Valley, where pre-historic cave sites document human occupation going back over 60,000 years. The capital city of Tehran has suffered the most damage, but Isfahan, the former Safavid capital and one of the most celebrated cities in the Islamic world, has also taken large hits. Once so grand it earned the nickname Nesf-e Jahan, or “Half the World,” Isfahan is a sister city to Florence, Italy – its Safavid rulers patrons of art and architecture on the scale of the Medicis. 

Daryaee, whose research focuses on ancient and late antique Iran, has been tracking the losses in real time through a network of colleagues, including archaeologists at the University of Chicago who’ve built an interactive map geolocating every damaged site in the country. The map has become essential as Iran’s internet blackouts have made it extremely difficult to verify what is being lost.

Learning from the past

One of the most persistent misconceptions about cultural heritage is that destruction is reversible. “You just can’t go buy glass from China and wood from IKEA and put this together,” Daryaee says. “That’s not how it’s done.” UNESCO’s designation requirements include standards of authenticity that reconstructed sites, however faithful, cannot meet. “If you bomb the Colosseum,” which is another UNESCO site, Cereti explains, “what you will reconstruct afterwards is not the Colosseum.”

So far, the damage has fallen largely on medieval and early modern structures in major city centers. But Iran has over 800 museums and thousands of registered archaeological sites, and its most ancient – including Persepolis, the ceremonial capital of the ancient Achaemenid Empire, and Pasargadae, where Cyrus the Great is buried – lie outside major population centers and have not yet been hit. Scholars who study what happens after wars end are not reassured by that distinction.

History offers a precedent, and it isn’t encouraging. Daryaee looks to Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, where modern conflicts have completely destroyed historic monuments. “If you want to erase people’s memory, their sense of cultural and historical belonging to a land, you destroy their monuments,” he says. “You destroy their memory of the past.”

Cereti has watched that process unfold firsthand. He led an archaeological mission in Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and Iraq War and saw what happens when a country’s central authority collapses: systematic looting of archaeological sites and museums, with objects disappearing into international black markets. “To this day, we do not really know what is missing in the Iraqi National Museum,” he says. “The effects are still being felt decades later.”

The pattern is not hard to read. Matthew P. Canepa, professor of art history and UCI Elahé Omidyar Mir-Djalali Presidential Chair in Art History and Archaeology of Ancient Iran, points to a distinction that sets Iran apart from its neighbors. Unlike Syria and Iraq, Iran was never swept by ISIS, which deliberately destroyed or looted every archaeological site it could reach. “Iran is the one country of major archaeological importance in the region that remains untouched,” he says, “and among many other reasons it is now unique in potentially being able to answer major archaeological and historical questions on a fine-grain level.” 

Even the Islamic Republic has maintained a different relationship with Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage than the Taliban or ISIS did in Afghanistan and Iraq. That distinction, Canepa argues, is precisely what is now in jeopardy. “Iranians have a deep sense of history and understanding of the central role their culture has played in multiple points in human history. If the present situation is poorly handled, humanity risks again losing the record and an understanding of its past that can never be recovered,” he warns.

What’s at stake closer to home

The risk is not abstract, and it doesn’t stop at Iran’s borders. For many Iranians, historic monuments symbolize the thread linking a civilization thousands of years old to the present day. When that thread is severed, we lose the collective memory embedded within them. 

“It really risks disconnecting a community in the United States from its roots, its past, its culture,” Cereti says. Over half of all diasporic Iranian Americans live in California alone. For many of them, these sites are living places that are inseparable from family stories and that are tied to a sense of who they are and where they come from.

UNESCO’s 1954 Hague Convention holds that damage to any nation’s cultural property is a loss to the heritage of all humanity. Daryaee agrees. “This is Iran’s cultural heritage, but it’s world cultural heritage,” he says. “It doesn’t belong to one group of people.” 

That sense of shared loss is what drives his and his colleagues’ work forward. It is, he says, exactly why this work matters. “The traces of a civilization have historical meaning,” he adds. “They have significance for people’s history. And once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

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