What Would You Save?

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00:01

Laura Tedesco

I'm not thinking that people are going to be thinking about this every day. But it should be important to really anybody with an interest in or a sense of culture, history, human achievement? Cultural survival is, or culture needs a seat at the table. Its preservation is merited. And not just for Afghans, but globally. That's my view of it.

00:36
George Gavrilis
This is Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Today we are continuing on Laura's journey into Afghanistan. If you are new to this podcast, we recommend going back to start with Episode 1. For everyone else, welcome back, and let's jump in.

00:54
George Gavrilis
If a war was coming and you knew that bombs would drop on the Smithsonian or that soldiers would loot the Louvre, what would you save? What would you leave behind? These are jarring to think about. In Afghanistan, where war has gone on for decades, museum staff think about these questions everyday.

01:12
George Gavrilis
In the 1990s, the staff of the National Museum risked their lives to hide priceless artifacts from fighting militias. They hid artifacts in several undisclosed locations around Kabul, so that if one cache was discovered, the others would be safe.

01:25
George Gavrilis
After 9/11, the U.S. overthrew the Taliban. A new government was formed in Afghanistan and the National Museum was patched up. Artifacts returned to the galleries. But the feeling that the museum was vulnerable never quite went away. And every so often, bombings nearby would rattle the building and blow out windows.

01:48
George Gavrilis
When Laura Tedesco visited the museum for the first time in 2010, she saw for herself how the small, war-damaged building was struggling to contain the treasures of thousands of years of history. She met the elegant museum director, Omara Khan Massoudi, who had risked his life over the years to protect the museum. Laura wanted to know what the U.S. could do to help. After many visits and polite conversations, Mr. Massoudi answered her question: We really need a new museum. Help us build a new museum for the country. 

02:27
Laura Tedesco
"August 2, 2010, first visit to the National Museum, and finally getting to meet Mr. Massoudi. So formal and elegant. I noticed the windows covered in wood, and he mentioned nonchalantly that they had been blasted out by a bomb recently. We drank several cups of tea, and smoked some cigarettes. The conversation was formal and stiff."

02:55

George Gavrilis
Hey, so Laurie. So I know that one of the really big stories you have to tell is about the National Museum of Afghanistan and the huge saga to save the artifacts and to rebuild it. Where does that story start for you?

03:11
Laura Tedesco

Yeah, for me, it starts in August of 2010. I would have arrived in Kabul in late July of 2010. And probably spent about the first two weeks getting my bearings, learning how to even request a car to go somewhere in town. I needed introductions, so that the other individuals, the Afghans working in the culture sector, became aware that I was present and on their team, so to speak, in the tribe. 

03:44

Laura Tedesco

So it would have been August of 2010. I made a trip, I believe I was by myself out to the National Museum of Afghanistan, which is on the southern end of the city of Kabul. So about a 20 or 30-minute drive from the U.S. Embassy. Could have been a much longer drive depending on traffic, but that's a different topic.

04:04
Laura Tedesco

I was greeted at the National Museum by the director, who is a very well-known and highly respected individual. His name's Omara Khan Massoudi. And I call him Mr. Massoudi. He's elegant, tall, slender, white haired— I think he would have been in his early 60s at the time that I met him. And he greeted me with the requisite Afghan hospitality. I don't think he greeted me any differently than he would have greeted any foreign visitor to the museum. 

04:35

George Gavrilis

What do you mean by that?

04:37
Laura Tedesco
Well, there's just a formality to it—the requisite questions that one has to ask when you meet someone new— how's your family, welcome to Kabul. So nice to have you here. Can I offer you some tea, that kind of thing. I probably had about six meetings with him that maintained that formality over the course of maybe the next six weeks, eight weeks, before there was a comfort level that developed between us in our conversation style and where we could really talk in detail about the National Museum and its past and where it was currently and what his hopes were for the National Museum.

05:17
Laura Tedesco
When one arrives in the height of summer, Kabul is filled with the most beautiful roses. And in fact, I don't know if we've ever talked about that, George, the impression that rose bushes make in Afghanistan. They're not like any kind of roses I've ever seen before. And I think roses, they're native to that part of the world, to Persia, to Iran, to Afghanistan. So they grow really well at the altitude, the dry air, the intense sun.

05:46
Laura Tedesco
The garden of the National Museum has hundreds if not thousands of very mature rose bushes, and they're all different colors and different varieties. There's this scent of roses—definitely something that I remember vividly. The museum itself was at that time, on appearances, a very respectable museum. You go in, there are things on display, large scale artifacts, a lot of archaeological material. We can talk about what's in the museum a little later. It was freshly painted. There was a kind of crispness to it.

06:32

Laura Tedesco

But as I visited the second, the third time, I started to notice that some of the windows were boarded up. Mr. Massoudi mentioned in passing, Oh, it was the recent explosion that had happened maybe a quarter mile away that had blown out some of the windows, but they were soon to be replaced— a quick mention of, they were soon to be replaced.

06:48
Laura Tedesco
What else is striking upon entering the museum is the quality of what's on display. It's the quality of artifacts. And these are objects that have all been excavated from Afghan soil. It's an archaeological museum for the most part, so you don't really find paintings, or modern sculpture or war memorabilia. That's not what's in the National Museum of Afghanistan. It is this representation of the country's deep, historic past, going back thousands and thousands of years.

07:24
Laura Tedesco
I want to point out some of this fascinating 19th century wooden sculpture from Nuristan. It's a province of Afghanistan to the east. And Nuristan was the last province to be converted to Islam. It was previously called Kafiristan, I believe. It was the province of non-believers. And Nuristan means the province of light— the province of believers. Pre-Islam, the Nuristanis were carving these larger than life-size ancestral figures. If you've never seen a Nuristani sculpture, the best way I can describe it is it evokes Sub-Saharan African sculpture. 

08:06

George Gavrilis

Are you talking, Benin Bronze style, that kind of appearance?

08:10

Laura Tedesco
No, I wish I knew enough about African sculpture to be able to pinpoint a specific region of Africa. I don't know enough, but that's what it evokes. There's a whole gallery devoted to these Nuristani sculptures. They're remarkable and very rare. They had been smashed by the Taliban, when the Taliban were in power. Some were preserved. Some were conserved or repaired after the Taliban were no longer in power.

08:41

Laura Tedesco

It only dawned on me a little bit later, what a bold statement it was, for this National Museum of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan to be displaying these almost totemic wooden effigies of ancestral figures. There's a lot to be said about that. 

09:00

Laura Tedesco

There may be other museums in the world where you can see these kinds of figures from Nuristan. I've not seen them in other museums. They're almost worth the trip to Afghanistan itself, just to see these figures. That's only one gallery. And this is a relatively small museum as museums go, so it's not hallway after hallway and gallery after gallery. I mean, you could go through it in maybe an hour, and see everything. Would you absorb everything? No, but you could see everything.

09:35

George Gavrilis

The museum building has this interesting history that it wasn't meant to be a museum originally. Right?

09:40

Laura Tedesco

That is true, George. The building itself was built as an annex office building to what was then the palace for the king of Afghanistan. It was built in 1922. It eventually became a museum— I don't actually know if it ever served as a true office building, if it was intended to be an office building, and was then repurposed to become a museum. It was created as a museum for the king, where he would put some of his state gifts that he would receive, those were sent to the museum.

10:13

Laura Tedesco
At the same time, the Afghan King gave the French government the sole concession to conduct archaeological excavations. France and Afghanistan have this long diplomatic relationship. The French archaeological delegation— which is referred to as DAFA— that's the acronym for it— began excavations in France and the arrangement was that the French could keep 50% of what they excavated, and Afghanistan would keep 50%. 

10:42

Laura Tedesco
And so 50% went back to France, and it's mostly in the Museé Guimet in Paris, where you can see tremendous Afghan material there. But what was left in Kabul is staggering for its quality of artifacts. What the French archaeologists were finding was redefining how people understood a whole millennia of history in that part of the world, in this part of Afghanistan, Eastern Pakistan. We could go on and on about that.

11:15

Laura Tedesco
But to stick with what was in the museum, I'm trying to say, the quality of material on display was really stunning. Keep in mind, this is after the 2001 campaign of iconoclasm, where the Taliban literally went through with sledgehammers and smashed hundreds and hundreds of artifacts.

11:39

George Gavrilis
Paint a picture for the listener. What would they have been seeing if they were a fly on the wall in the museum when the Taliban were coming through?

11:48

Laura Tedesco

I don't know exactly what people would have been seeing. I've never heard firsthand accounts of people who saw the Taliban come in with the sledgehammers. I've only heard secondhand accounts. And I heard two years ago from an Afghan journalist, something very, very interesting. And I believed what he told me. He said, when the Taliban were in power, they were actually actively taking care of the material in the National Museum. And were sort of curating it, so to speak. Were any of them trained curators? I don't know. But they were tending to the collections in the National Museum.

12:28

Laura Tedesco
And it wasn't until this edict came out in March of 2001, when the Buddhas of Bamiyan were destroyed, that at the same time, and I think it was even the same week, that the Taliban changed course and then took it upon themselves to sledgehammer hundreds of irreplaceable Buddhist artifacts, the Nuristani sculptures, just smashing them. I have seen the fragments of the sculptures. You can still see the sledgehammer marks across the face and down the nose of say, a bodhisattva, or a ceramic or baked clay Buddha head. And there's an effort right now to piece all of these things back together like a jigsaw puzzle. That's underway. 

13:15

Laura Tedesco

So in 2010, as I was getting to know the National Museum, and some of the staff working there, and most importantly, the director, the beloved Mr. Massoudi, I was getting to learn the tremendous collection, and also what was needed in the National Museum. 

13:32

Laura Tedesco

There's no air conditioning, there's no climate control. For a museum, that's brutal. There was not one fire extinguisher, or buckets of sand. But that's actually very practical. There was no emergency exit, for example. The list goes on and on. The water was shoddy, the electricity wasn't regular. There was one working toilet in the whole museum. So the needs were fairly great.

13:55

George Gavrilis

Who did you see visiting the museum, when you were there during the various visits?

14:00

Laura Tedesco

Yeah, at that time, I mean, Kabul was teeming with foreigners, and teeming with aid workers and dignitaries and diplomats. So there were always people in the museum. It wasn't packed to the gills with visitors. But there were always people milling around, and plenty of Afghans also— families, young men, you know, coming in pairs as they do, maybe just killing time or, or genuinely interested in what was in the museum.

14:27

Laura Tedesco
And increasingly, over the years, I saw more and more schoolchildren coming, where it was starting to be arranged, where school kids would come in droves, like a field trip for school. And public schools in Kabul, they don't have school buses, the way we think of our public schools in the United States. You know, you do a field trip, everybody gets on a school bus and they go to the museum or to the theater, to the planetarium. 

14:53

Laura Tedesco

Having Afghan school children come to the museum often meant they were kids in private schools, or some arrangement had been made for separate transportation for young kids to go in. What I was being told as recently as late 2019, was that as many as 10,000 school kids were visiting the National Museum every year. It's not a small number.

15:16

George Gavrilis

Did you see some of the school groups yourself?

15:19

Laura Tedesco

Oh, Yeah. Yeah.

15:21

George Gavrilis

What did some of the kids look like? What do you think they were thinking?

15:24

Laura Tedesco

I don't know what they were thinking. I imagine they may have been bored the way most kids are, when they go to a museum.

15:32

George Gavrilis

Probably, we were bored … 

15:33
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

15:34
George Gavrilis
… we were bored when we were forced to go to the museums without a doubt.

15:37

Laura Tedesco

Fourth grade and someone sends you to a museum? Seriously. The kids who were excited about museums in the fourth grade are the kids who get beat up. Come on.

15:47

George Gavrilis

How remarkable that they experience something different than they would have otherwise, and what might they have said to their parents when they went home. 

15:56

Laura Tedesco

One wonders about that. I can only make guesses. Would a child have gone home and reported seeing a Buddha? And perhaps if the family were especially conservative, they may have said something to dissuade the child from being interested in that. 

16:13

Laura Tedesco

Or if the family were not conservative and keen on something like that they may have, you know, encouraged the child to learn more, say, You know, our cousin is named Ashoka. Do you know where the name of Ashoka comes from, that's from a great Gandharan King. It's impossible to say. But one hopes it instills at least a little sparkle for some, the best we can hope for some kids. That's not unique to Afghanistan, though.

16:38

George Gavrilis

I'd like to go to this conversation that you had with Mr. Massoudi, where you said that you would take it back to the Embassy. But before I do, I want to ask you something else. If we were going to the museum together, what artifact would you take me to and talk about for a while to me?

16:57

Laura Tedesco

Hmm, that is hard. I couldn't choose just one.

17:01

George Gavrilis

Tell me a couple then.

17:03

Laura Tedesco

Oh, man. I mean, my mind is racing. I'm going, okay, we go to that one, or we go to that one. Absolutely the Nuristani carvings, because you're not going to see those in Paris, at the Musée Guimet, at least I don't think they're there.

17:17

Laura Tedesco
Then there is a Mihrab. It's a portion of a mosque, the prayer niche that had been moved from the city Lashkar Gah, which is in Helmand Province, and relocated in the National Museum in Kabul. And it's really spectacular. It's not a showpiece, there's not glitzy colored tile, it's not brightly painted, but it has very intricate carving, and you enter a niche in the National Museum. So you're secluded with this Mihrab. You can go right up to it. There's no stanchion or guard telling you to step back and don't touch. You could really have a kind of experience with this thousand-year old architectural feature that's now been relocated to Kabul.

18:09

George Gavrilis

Laurie, jog my memory, the Mihrab is that sculpted notch in the mosque…

18:14

Laura Tedesco

Yes.

18:15

George Gavrilis
… that points the way to Mecca. 

18:18

Laura Tedesco

Yes.

18:19

George Gavrilis
For the faithful.

18:20

Laura Tedesco

Yeah, exactly.

18:21

George Gavrilis

Did you have a third one you would take me to?

18:23

Laura Tedesco

That'd be tough. I'd stroll around and see if something caught your eye. And then we'd spend a little time there.

18:31

George Gavrilis

So what did Mr. Massoudi ask?

18:34

Laura Tedesco

It took months of meetings and hundreds of cups of tea and chatting. It's really, it was about relationship building and trust building. And, I think, a demonstration to Massoudi that I was seriously interested in what he thought was needed for the National Museum of Afghanistan. It took months. I remember it was early December of 2010. And I was at one of scores of tea drinking sessions in Mr. Massoudi's office and saying, you know, Mr. Massoudi, I think that the U.S. Embassy is going to have substantial support to offer the National Museum. Let's talk about what you would really prioritize as the needs for the museum.

19:25

Laura Tedesco
I already had an inkling because we've been talking around this topic for months. And it was, do you want to try to put in an AC system, should we retrofit the building for heating and air conditioning and climate control. These are all the conversations that had been taking place. I should mention— I should preface that I was also talking with other culture experts in Afghanistan about this at the same time, to get a collective of views and opinions and everybody had an opinion. But it was Mr. Massoudi's opinion that was the most important.

19:58

Laura Tedesco
His first request was, he said, we really need a new museum. 

20:04

George Gavrilis
A whole new museum?

20:05

Laura Tedesco
A whole new museum. Let's just start from scratch. He said, also, we should move the parking. Because at that time, if you were coming in a car to visit the National Museum, you could pull up within seven or 10 feet of the building. That's very convenient. But if you have nefarious impulses, and you've laden your car with explosives, that is not a good way to have the parking arranged. So there was discussion of these very practical and nitty gritty rehabilitations— let's move the parking far away, a safe blast distance, that was talked about in a very frank way.

20:41

Laura Tedesco
And there is this collection of old cars that the king had owned, the king of Afghanistan. In fact, the very first armored car ever made was for the king of Afghanistan. And I've always kind of chuckled about that. Well, there's a funny coincidence there that now all of Kabul is rolling with armored cars. But anyway. And these cars were sitting out under the sun and the windshields were broken. And these are antique vintage vehicles, Cadillacs, Rolls Royces, French cars. They were sitting out in the open air in the sun. Let's make a covering for those.

21:15

Laura Tedesco
The real takeaway was to build a new museum. I said to Mr. Massoudi, let me go back. And I loved the idea. I was like, Yes, let's, we need to do this. How can we do this? I took the idea back to several supervisors above me, somebody who actually had decision making power at the U.S. Embassy, and I presented this. And I got a Yes, let's do it.

21:40

George Gavrilis

No hesitation?

22:42

Laura Tedesco
There was probably hesitation. Maybe they said, we have to talk to the Ambassador or something like that. The hesitation is now not prominent in my mind. What I do remember was that the answer was yes. And figure out how to do it.

21:57

George Gavrilis

What in your mind at the time would have been some of the risks of the U.S. getting involved in building a whole new national museum for a country? It's a sensitive subject. It's about who we are. It's about our core identity. That's what national museums are about in a sense.

22:10

Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

22:11

George Gavrilis
And here's the U.S. coming in offering to build a whole new National Museum.

22:15

Laura Tedesco

Right. Yeah, extremely sensitive topic. It smacks of all kinds of yucky impulses of arrogance and colonialism and nation building and shaping a nation's heritage, its narrative. I knew that was not what this project was about, but one has to be very aware to manage this impression that it could give.

22:39
Laura Tedesco
And I should preface that the general sentiment among other internationals working in Kabul was reflexively anti-American. And sort of just irritable from the moment they woke up— a what are the Americans doing now? They come waltzing in with all their money. They want to change stuff. And now they want to build a new museum? Who do they think they are? And they don't even know anything about Afghanistan.

23:07

George Gavrilis

OK, but how do you respond when you're at a function or a meeting, and you get a whiff of this attitude? Do you say anything? Do you correct it? What do you do?

23:17

Laura Tedesco

Um ...No. Correcting it seemed impossible. I tried to conduct myself not that way. Not waltzing into functions or meetings or coordinating committee meetings with any arrogance or pretense. I wouldn't have done that anyway. I was hyper aware— like I'm walking into a room of people who've devoted their entire lives to Afghan heritage. And I just showed up three months ago. Just listen and nod kind of thing. Take it all in and read a book. Keep reading the books. That was my M.O.

23:56

George Gavrilis
You've been listening to Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. Don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. To stay in touch, also follow us on Instagram, at the_monuments_woman. Join us next week when we dive deeper.

24:13

George Gavrilis
This show is produced by Christian D. Bruun and May Eleven Projects. It is recorded by Audivita Studios, and edited by Shaun Hettinger and Greg Williams. The theme song is This Love by Ariana Delawari, featuring Salar Nader.

Ep 4: What Would You Save? — National Museum, Part 1 of 2 

Topics Covered in this Episode 

Meeting Omara Khan Massoudi

National Museum collection: Nuristani material

Origin of National Museum

DAFA (French Archaeological Delegation in Afghanistan)

The Taliban and sledgehammers, 2001

State of the museum in 2010

School groups to the National Museum

Favorite works in the museum

Mr. Massoudi requested assistance

US helping Afghanistan build a museum: risks

Recorded on May 21, 2021