An Act of Defiance

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00:04

Laura Tedesco

I do remember at the closing ceremony of the Herat Citadel restoration, and that was in late 2011, when the work was largely done, and there was a big ceremony to commemorate the work. And there were dignitaries giving remarks, including many Afghans and the then Governor of Herat. He said, of all the things that the United States had done for Herat— building schools, paving roads, irrigation canals, etc. they would be remembered for supporting the preservation of the Herat Citadel. I've always remembered that, and hoped that it was true.

00:51
George Gavrilis
It’s difficult to forget the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas back in 2001 by the Taliban. After all, it was captured in a video that was seen around the world. But this overshadowed another act of destruction. Before the dust settled in Bamiyan, Taliban forces entered the National Museum and smashed to pieces hundreds of artifacts bearing human forms, including scores of ancient Buddha heads.

01:16
George Gavrilis
In 2017, a project began to restore the Buddha heads and undo some of the damage the Taliban had done. In this episode of Monuments Woman, Laurie and I talk about the team of Afghan museum staff and the preservationists from the University of Chicago who labored side by side to repair the artifacts. And we talk about Omar Sultan, the former deputy minister of culture who encouraged Laurie to think about lasting partnerships and who affectionately encouraged her saying, "Keep driving, Laura-jan".

01:48
George Gavrilis
The work to repair the museum artifacts was not just about restoration. It was also an act of defiance, meant to convey to the Taliban that "we will fix what you destroy." But today, with the Taliban again in control of the country, what will become of the Buddha heads? Will they sit in the museum’s warehouse, repaired but unseen?

02:12
George Gavrilis
This is Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. We will be wrapping up Laura's journey in Afghanistan in the next episodes. If you are new to this podcast, we recommend starting with Episode 1. For everyone else, welcome back. Let's jump in.

02:31
George Gavrilis
Hey, what happened at home?

02:33
Laura Tedesco
I was sitting in my office, on a Saturday afternoon, and I hear an enormous bang on the roof of my house. And my office happens to be right below the roof. I got kind of scared because earlier in the day, my husband had been on the roof. And I was like, oh, no, did he fall? So I rush outside. It was not Franck. It was a raccoon that had fallen out of a tree onto my roof in the middle of the afternoon. And I think raccoons are nocturnal.

03:09
Laura Tedesco
It rolled off the roof onto the front sidewalk twitching. I was like, what do I do? So I quickly called the Department of Natural Resources that has a hotline for things like this. And I reached the 24 hour- Saturday afternoon hotline lady who was very knowledgeable and I'm like, Hey, a raccoon. I tell her what happened. And I'm like, it's twitching on my front sidewalk. What do I do?

03:36
Laura Tedesco
And she's like, well, you can't really do anything. Don't touch it because it's sick. And I'm like, well, it's not only sick, now it's seriously injured. So while I'm on the phone with her, the raccoon staggers up and drags a leg and wanders off underneath some big bushes in my front yard. I learned that there is a big outbreak of distemper among raccoons in my town, and there's sick raccoons all over town. The only take-home from this was, well, the raccoon disappeared. I don't know what happened to it. We do have birds of prey that fly around my neighborhood. So I assume it got picked up. I have to keep an eye on my pets which are mostly outdoor pets that they don't somehow contract distemper—

04:21
George Gavrilis
—or apparently gets swooped up by a hawk.

04:24
Laura Tedesco
Or get swooped up by a bald eagle, which are nesting in the trees near my house.

04:31
George Gavrilis
So in the microcosm of your garden that we previously compared to Afghanistan, since, you know, your cat had a fight with a Copperhead and won—

04:38
Laura Tedesco
Right.

04:39
George Gavrilis
—who does the raccoon represent?

04:42
Laura Tedesco
Oh my god.

04:43
George Gavrilis
Or what?

04:44
Laura Tedesco
Good question. I don't know. I have to give that some thought. I mean, like this sick animal that helplessly falls out of a tree and staggers off?

04:52
George Gavrilis
And staggers off never to be seen again.

04:55
Laura Tedesco
Right. I don't know. Like, unknown conclusion?

04:59
George Gavrilis
Yeah. Gosh, I'm thinking Ashraf Ghani.

05:02
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, that came to mind.

05:04
George Gavrilis
Yeah, I knew it would, but you wouldn't be the first to say it because you're very direct, but you're also diplomatic.

05:12
George Gavrilis
You saw somebody very special to you recently.

05:15
Laura Tedesco
I did, yeah. This past weekend, just a couple of days ago, I drove a few hours from my house to visit an old friend of mine, an Afghan named Omar Sultan.

05:26
George Gavrilis
Great name.

05:28
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, he's older. He's in his 70s, and someone who I worked with very closely when I was working in Kabul in 2010, 2011, 2012. He was the Deputy Minister of Culture. Our work had to overlap on nearly everything. I genuinely enjoy his company. We have a good time together. He's always ready to laugh at something, which is a delightful trait.

05:50
Laura Tedesco
I drove up to see him. We had a dinner together. I spent the night at his home with his wife and daughter and grandchildren. And the next morning, we had a cup of coffee and I drove four and a half hours back home. Was a treat to see him. It's been years.

06:05
George Gavrilis
What did you talk about?

06:06
Laura Tedesco
Oh, well, Afghanistan, of course, just incessantly. The work he and I did together, what's happened of course since August, you know, his speculations, our feelings about it. People we know in common, where they are, what they're doing. The state of heritage. Omar is an archaeologist. So he—

06:29
George Gavrilis
His background is really interesting. Paint a picture of his background because he's such a fascinating person.

06:34
Laura Tedesco
He is. So well, he's born in Kabul, happened to attend high school with Ashraf Ghani. Omar went to Greece for college and for a master's degree in Thessaloniki and studied archaeology there. He speaks Greek fluently, he says he's often mistook for a Greek. He emigrated to the United States, I think it was 1980, and was married at that time, but a young man.

07:02
George Gavrilis
He would have gone to the U.S. right after the Soviet invasion then.

07:04
Laura Tedesco
I think so.

07:06
George Gavrilis
Or on the heels of it.

07:07
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, he had a period where he was waiting in a third country for his paperwork to process before he could move to the United States. But yes, right around the time of the Soviet invasion, he moved with his wife who was pregnant. And they've raised three children in the U.S.

07:27
Laura Tedesco
It was around 2002, I think, that Omar made one of his first trips back to Afghanistan since having left as a refugee. Soon after, I don't know the precise year, but he was appointed Deputy Minister of Culture, and that's how I got to know him when I started working there in 2010.

07:46
George Gavrilis
Omar also happens to be the Deputy Minister that you've mentioned before, who had polio?

07:52
Laura Tedesco
He did. He had polio as a child. So he walks with a bit of a limp, and a cane, but it has done nothing to slow him down.

08:00
George Gavrilis
And that's what's so interesting, isn't it, that the people you worked with have experienced adversities that we can only imagine.

08:08
Laura Tedesco
Mm hm.

08:10
George Gavrilis
Right. Like war, disease, revolutions, invasions.

08:13
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

08:14
George Gavrilis  
Over and over again. It's remarkable.

08:19
George Gavrilis
What was that first year like working with Omar?

08:22
Laura Tedesco
Oh, so optimistic. Truly. I mean, I think none of us were particularly naive. We were busy. He was working long hours. Everybody was, and there was a sense of, we were doing something together, with the same goals in mind of preserving sites. Omar was instrumental in some of the work to preserve Mes Aynak, in fact, so there was just a sense that we were on the same team.

08:53
Laura Tedesco
As I mentioned, I happen to really enjoy his company. We would have gatherings in the evenings, he would play his instruments and sing and host elaborate dinners and— it was always, though, centered on the work we were doing.

09:07
George Gavrilis
Did you talk this time around about his love of music?

09:11
Laura Tedesco
On this recent visit, we didn't talk a lot about music in particular.

09:16
George Gavrilis
These videos have been coming out of the Taliban smashing instruments in Afghanistan.

09:20
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, Omar says there is no new leaf that they've turned. It's not Omar's first time at the rodeo.

09:28
George Gavrilis
No, no, it's not.

09:32
Laura Tedesco
Like with Mr. Massoudi, with whom I had— I can't even count all the conversations about planning what was needed and listening to them very closely about their insights on what was important about Afghan heritage and ways to contextualize support for preserving Afghan heritage. And Omar was very much like Mr. Massoudi to me, this elder who had a great deal of knowledge and insights on how things were done, and—

10:04
Laura Tedesco
He calls me Laura-jan. And it warms my heart a little bit. Maybe it sounds silly, but I always smile when he says that. If I would come up with projects that were maybe with big ideas, he would say keep going, keep driving, Laura-jan.

10:23
Laura Tedesco
And he was often guiding that partnerships needed to be conceived of in long-term ways. That while it's fine to have a team, say of archaeologists, or in the case of the National Park Service guys who we worked with in Ghazni, that they came for a week or so for targeted projects, with Omar, for there to be lasting difference— this was always something he was stressing in our conversations— partnerships need to be shaped in a way that were enduring.

10:56
Laura Tedesco
Our focus was not just the National Museum. We were talking about all kinds of things. And I visited a number of archaeological sites with Omar that ultimately we couldn't do any excavation at or preservation. There were just too many projects to shepherd. But the National Museum was always a key focus. The needs were great. And in order to really address those, we needed to think of ways to do that with extended enduring partnerships.

11:29
George Gavrilis
Well, one of the partners that you found — one of the more enduring partners — was a team at the University of Chicago, and we've spoken about them a little bit in the past, but there's a bigger story to tell here.

11:41
George Gavrilis
There's something that I find very appealing about the relationship that you've had with the University of Chicago. That was my university. And I'm extremely fond of that place for a couple reasons.

11:53
George Gavrilis
One is because it's kind of a dark and brooding place like me, you know, has this Neo-Gothic architecture, quadrangles closed in on themselves. It feels like a bizarro Oxford, or something, if you will, right. Now, because it's in the Southside of Chicago. What is Neo-Gothic architecture doing in the middle of South Chicago? But it was really intense. I don't think many people know that it's not a university like others.

12:20
George Gavrilis
When I was there in the 90s, the undergraduate population was a tiny fraction of the graduate population, which meant that after your first year as an undergrad, you're sharing most of your classes with graduate students, and it was sink or swim. So it was like a super intense period in my life.

12:37
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, I bet it was.

12:39
George Gavrilis
Yeah. And incidentally, I spent a lot of hours just pacing the corridors of the Oriental Institute, the museum there.

12:47
Laura Tedesco
Right.

12:48
George Gavrilis
Or just sitting on a bench like staring at a sculpture or a fragment of something, just, you know, to nurse my wounds when something tragic had happened in a relationship or a friendship at the university or I got a bad grade, you know.

13:00
Laura Tedesco
Right. Yeah. Museums are a good place to do that.

13:04
George Gavrilis
That's a cool place. Right?

13:06
Laura Tedesco
Right.

13:09
George Gavrilis
But tell me about the team. Tell me about the U of C team.

13:12
Laura Tedesco
Omar Sultan, Mr. Massoudi, myself, a few others, we would have started talking about this in 2010, 2011. Like, alright, we're identifying some fairly major needs at the National Museum that are really going to need sustained attention and support, this is going to be long-term work. How do we do this?

13:34
Laura Tedesco
So at that time, the US Embassy was very flush with money. So we could conceive of big projects. And the security landscape in Kabul at that time was safe enough that it wasn't out of the question to conceive of having a team of Americans come and live for very extended periods of time on the economy of Kabul.

13:54
Laura Tedesco
What happened was, the US Embassy issued a call for proposals, like we always do, hey, send us your ideas. This is the kind of work we want to have implemented. And the University of Chicago submitted a proposal. And they were awarded a grant that was originally conceived to be only two or three years long. And it was to catalogue all the collections in the National Museum.

14:18
Laura Tedesco
It's not sexy. It's not ribbon cutting worthy. It's not going to make it into the newspaper. But it was and it remains very important work. Because unless you know what's in the museum, you can't plan exhibitions, if things were to get stolen, how do you know what was stolen if you didn't have a catalog?

14:39
George Gavrilis
But then how did the museum keep track of what it had if it didn't have a catalog, even deep in the 21st century?

14:45
Laura Tedesco
It had piecemeal catalogs. The French had done valiant work of cataloguing artifacts that the French had excavated, but that didn't represent the entire holdings of the National Museum. And there had been other efforts to piecemeal catalog. None of them were coordinated. Some of them weren't even in the same languages. Some had photos, some didn't have. Nothing was standardized. And keep in mind, there are new artifacts coming into the National Museum all the time that were being excavated from places like Mes Aynak and other excavations.

15:23
Laura Tedesco
And the University of Chicago took this on. And it's not just about creating the catalog, it's about establishing relationships with the Afghan staff of the National Museum. The work would not be successful if the relationships weren't also being built at the same time.

15:42
Laura Tedesco
And Mr. Massoudi was the director of the National Museum and he was endorsing this partnership and encouraging his staff who may have been reluctant at first, like, Oh, what are these people coming in here and telling us how to run our museum once again. And Mr. Massoudi would have been encouraging his staff like, you know, it's alright, it's gonna go fine. They're going to be here for a while.

16:10
George Gavrilis
One of the very important projects that you added to the portfolio was the reconstruction of the shattered Buddha heads.

16:19
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, this project in particular is very significant for many reasons. But I'm going to try to sketch this out for you, George. So—

16:30
George Gavrilis
Yeah.

16:31
Laura Tedesco
In 2001, as we know, and we've talked about, the Taliban destroyed the Buddhas of Bamiyan. And the same week they did that, they also went into the National Museum with sledgehammers, and smashed hundreds of sculptures, some of the Nuristani sculptures, Buddhist material, sculptures that represented animals.

16:53
Laura Tedesco
But among the collections that were the most devastated, was a collection of sculptures from a site called Hadda, which is in Nangarhar province to the east. And Hadda had been excavated by the French in the 1930s. Those sculptural heads, most were complete.

17:12
Laura Tedesco
Imagine undamaged Buddha heads, bodhisattvas, the size of say, anything from a clementine to a cantaloupe, and everything in between. And these delicate, baked and unbaked clay sculptures. So they were smashed with sledgehammers. When the museum staff could get into the National Museum after this smashing in March of 2001, all they could do was simply sweep up the fragments of the smashed sculptures and put them in boxes. That was all that was really able to be done.

17:50
Laura Tedesco
And it took years and years before the museum was at a place where there was going to be a team involved for long enough to begin to unpack these boxes, with all of the fragments, and lay them out on six, seven, eight, nine lab tables, spread them out, and begin the tedious, painstaking work of trying to piece them back together like a jigsaw puzzle.

18:21
Laura Tedesco
And that's what the University of Chicago was finally in a position to be able to do after working for five years and completing the catalog of artifacts. And they needed financial support to do that, and the State Department was to provide that financial support. And I was in the background advocating, and you have to explain to people who may be skeptical, like Well, why would we want to fix these Buddha heads?

18:47
Laura Tedesco
It's actually a fairly political thing to do. And it's a way to tangibly demonstrate, not just respect for heritage, but that the Taliban's damage can't be permanent. So the plan was— Well, the plan has changed since Kabul fell in August. But the idea was eventually to have an exhibition featuring these restored heads. As an act of defiance, almost, that they were once broken, and we fixed them, and everybody can come see this. That exhibition was planned for this coming summer 2022. But they won't be happening.

19:28
George Gavrilis
Right.

18:29
Laura Tedesco
But maybe in future years.

19:30
George Gavrilis
Where are the heads now?

19:31
Laura Tedesco
They're safely stored in Kabul.

19:38
George Gavrilis
Tell me, what do we learn when we put together a shattered head? Is there any silver lining to being able to go through that process of restoring something that was deliberately destroyed?

19:49
Laura Tedesco
Oddly, you can learn some things that you could not have learned had they not been broken. When you're faced with the fragments of something that was molded by hand, or in a mold— we won't go into the technology of sort of how they were made specifically, and you can look at the interior of this object, you then have access to information that you couldn't have otherwise had access to. You can see precisely the composition of the clay, maybe you could even analyze the clay and understand where it may have been sourced.

20:25
Laura Tedesco
Or you can see subtle cracks and fractures in the interior of a sculptural head to know how it would have been formed and fired, and perhaps make reasonable assumptions about— at what temperature would it have been fired? What kind of kilns were they using? Were these all made locally? Were they made in a region and some were imported and traded? I mean, there's infinite questions. There's 20 PhD theses that can be written based on these broken Buddha heads.

20:58
Laura Tedesco
Some very cutting edge conservation work was being done in Kabul, with the Afghan staff of the museum, and the Oriental Institute team in this, you know, freezing, no electricity, not particularly sort of a high tech conservation lab at the National Museum.

21:18
George Gavrilis
What do you mean by cutting edge? What was cutting edge about the work being done? Because Laurie, to somebody who's not an archaeologist, to somebody who's not a preservationist, I would almost imagine that it's like trying to put together a puzzle and using some sort of professional glue to stick it back together.

21:31
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

21:33
George Gavrilis
Probably way more complex than that.

21:35
Laura Tedesco
A little bit more complex than that. Say for example, you know, when you break a plate at home or a coffee cup that drops on the kitchen floor or something, and you might pick up all the pieces, but there's always like little bits missing so you can never have—

21:49
George Gavrilis
Yeah, like those little irritating gaps.

21:51
Laura Tedesco
Yeah, so you can never really glue it back together.

21:54
George Gavrilis
So your milk is gonna leak out of the cereal bowl even if you use your Elmers glue stick.

21:59
Laura Tedesco
Exactly. Not dissimilar with these Buddha heads. Imagine something, clay, gets smashed with a sledgehammer, and you've got mostly the fragments. But you can't really glue them back together because there are those missing bits, you're not going to get a firm join. But if you've got the fragments, and you're like, yeah, these kind of all fit together and would make a single head, you can do 3D scanning of them, and create a 3D computer-generated model of what that head would have looked like.

22:33
Laura Tedesco
This is the work, it's tedious and there's photography, and you're documenting everything along the way and making notes and intense observations that the way people who conserve artifacts, they know how to do this. No one else in Central Asia was doing that kind of conservation work.

22:56
George Gavrilis
Yeah, so hundreds of these were destroyed—

22:59
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

23:01
George Gavrilis
When you're doing a project like this, how many is enough in terms of reconstituting them, repairing them, restoring them? The whole collection? Just enough to make a point? Half of them?

23:13
Laura Tedesco
Right.

23:14
George Gavrilis
What did the project envision?

23:16
Laura Tedesco
Good question. I don't think that we had enough financial support for the five or so years, I don't know exactly how long it would have taken to restore all of them. But that would have been the ideal goal. I would have continued to advocate within the State Department, like come on, guys, we just need a little— we're almost there. We need a little more money to keep this team going.

23:37
Laura Tedesco
But, you know, circumstances changed. And that's not where we are. So to your question, what would have been the goal? Get as many repaired as possible, record as much as possible, document it, you know, to the best of our ability.

23:54
George Gavrilis
I like how you're very open about how a lot your work in the context of Afghanistan does have political elements. Undeniably. Was this the most political of all the projects you had done?

24:08
Laura Tedesco
It may have been, in not an overt way. Because it's not necessarily obvious in the ways it's political.

24:17
George Gavrilis
How so?

24:18
Laura Tedesco
You and I know how political the use and misuse of culture can be to achieve certain ends of domination, subjugation, humiliation, etc. But within the context of international diplomacy, often a museum isn't one that rises to the top as a key diplomatic tool or a key political messaging vector.

24:46
Laura Tedesco
The destruction of the Buddhas— not just in Bamiyan but these artifacts we're talking about in the National Museum— that was a political gesture on the part of the Taliban, and it was iconoclastic and there were a multitude of motivations for destroying this material. The act of trying to repair it and bring attention a) to the destruction which happened 20 years ago, and then b) bring attention to its restoration, is in a kind of crude way, it's giving the finger to the Taliban and their iconoclastic mandate. And then displaying these artifacts which was the ultimate goal, these restored artifacts, and inviting Afghans in to see them. There's something rehabilitating in that.

25:34
George Gavrilis
Yeah, totally restorative.

25:37
Laura Tedesco
Restorative.

25:39
George Gavrilis
Yeah, I like that.

25:40
Laura Tedesco
Maybe it could symbolize all kinds of positive messages.

25:44
George Gavrilis
What does it mean though, that we weren't able to finish the project, and that the Buddha heads are still stored away in the museum or in a museum locker in Kabul?

25:58
Laura Tedesco
The big hope is that the staff of the National Museum will be able to pick up this work without the University of Chicago. They have the skills to do it. Do they have the supplies? I don't know. Can we get them supplies? Not right now. But maybe down the road we can. The hope is that the very able staff of the National Museum would be able to pick up this project and carry it to a conclusion.

26:26
George Gavrilis
The list of projects that the University of Chicago has done is very impressive, and that's why I think you call them the Dream Team. There was the cataloguing of the entire collection of the National Museum. There was the satellite imaging that not only maps Afghanistan's archaeological sites, it's also helping us keep track of looting. The reconstruction of the Buddha heads. There's a lot in their portfolio that's pretty amazing.

26:49
Laura Tedesco
Yeah.

26:50
Laura Tedesco
And we are now nearly 10 years later. And the University of Chicago is still working on material related to the National Museum. They're not in Kabul, you know, obviously, the Oriental Institute team is not working in Kabul, but they're doing work remotely.

27:07
George Gavrilis
Who are these people that constitute this dream team? What are they like?

27:12
Laura Tedesco
They're all awesome. We've had to work on these sometimes seemingly impossible projects for 10 years together. All of it is being led by Gil Stein, who was the director of the Oriental Institute. Alejandro Gallego Lopez is the field director of the Oriental Institute projects in Kabul, he's in charge on the ground, was there living months and months at a time. He's Spanish. He's in Madrid now. He speaks like six languages, including Dari. He's one of the most brilliant archaeologists I've ever encountered.

27:48
Laura Tedesco
Fabio, the senior conservator, he is Italian, and he lives in Rome. And he had been working in Afghanistan since the early 2000s. And so it was really kind of amazing when he decided to join the Oriental Institute team, because he is so skilled, and he knows Afghanistan and its material culture and how to be a conservator there. He knows it maybe better than anyone.

28:19
George Gavrilis
You know, given that the University of Chicago team is ultimately people whose roots are in different countries, did any of them feel uncomfortable initially about working for what was largely a State Department funded project?

28:32
Laura Tedesco
None of them articulated it quite that way to me, but I think that they may have had some trepidation about it initially. I wasn't blind to that. And I don't blame them. The State Department seems like this big machine. And you know, what's that going to be like? And, and but I think that over time they knew I trusted them, and they could trust me.

29:01
George Gavrilis
At some point, you helped the Chicago team set themselves up in a house in Kabul. What was that like?

29:08
Laura Tedesco
Right. They needed a home base. Prior to that they'd been living in guest houses and renting out rooms on an extended stay basis. The security situation was starting to decline in Kabul, this was you know, 2015, 2016, 2017 and a place that was more secure was needed in order to keep the team on the ground in Kabul.

29:33
Laura Tedesco
They had a whole Afghan team — fixers and drivers and guards. How do you find a rental house in Kabul, you know, do you look on Craigslist? So you need a team that can help you navigate that.

29:45
Laura Tedesco
So they found their own house. But the house wasn't outfitted well enough for security apparatus. And so we needed to take care of that. Bars on the windows, a safe room, CCTVs, making the walls on the exterior garden taller. So they couldn't be scaled, putting razor wire on the top of the walls, measures that are taken to increase the security of a place where a bunch of foreigners are staying for a long time. And it also needs to be very low profile, or as low profile as possible. So it blends right in, doesn't draw any attention to itself as a residence for foreigners.

30:22
Laura Tedesco
All the support to do that was provided by the Department of State. The Oriental Institute would come to me, and they'd say, you know what, we need to increase the security, we need a safe room now. We have discussions internal to my office of, this is what it's going to take, we need to allocate the money for this.

30:38
George Gavrilis
What does it cost, ballpark, to build a safe room in a house in Kabul?

30:43
Laura Tedesco
It's been a few years. I don't remember the price. I ensure that they get the support that they need to do their work.

30:52
George Gavrilis
So was the University of Chicago team's house nicer than the shipping container that you stayed at?

30:59
Laura Tedesco
Yeah. Yeah. There's no question. I mean, first, it was a house, not a shipping container. It had a garden. It's not about comparison, but they had much nicer facilities than a shipping container, as they should.

31:20
George Gavrilis
When we look ahead, and we think about the exhibition that was scheduled for the summer of this year, that's not going to happen, the exhibition of the restored Buddha heads. What is possible from this moment on? You said that it would be great if the staff can at least quietly continue to restore the Buddha heads and push ahead with the work and that they have the skills. But beyond that, if you had your druthers in a Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, what would you do with these Buddha heads?

31:56
Laura Tedesco
I don't know. I haven't quite dared to dream that yet.

32:08
George Gavrilis
What did it feel like to see Omar after all this time, and to be thinking about what is essentially a different country now, Afghanistan?

32:18
Laura Tedesco
I'll tell you what it felt like to see Omar. It felt like visiting a beloved relative, who I haven't seen in a while. And it's not that I confuse Omar— he's not my uncle, it's not that way. He's like a beloved elder relative to me. And I was so welcomed in his house this weekend, and his wife who's so dear. She happens to know I like Afghan food and she had cooked my favorite Afghan foods all day long, you know, because these things take time to cook.

32:53
Laura Tedesco
And when I walked in, the house just smelled delicious, and I was greeted so warmly and that there was a kind of comfort. I think that's partly the age difference between Omar and me. But also maybe that's something about the relationship that we formed that there was not just a friendship, but maybe something a little harder to describe—beyond friendship— I have an affection for him as an elder. And I think there was something poignant for me because as you know, George, in the course of our recording this podcast, my dad passed away—

33:32
George Gavrilis
Yeah.

33:33  
Laura Tedesco
I don't talk about it. I mean, why would I talk about it on the podcast. But I'm quite acutely aware of the absence of older, guiding voices to me. So there was for me personally, and I didn't say this to Omar, it was particularly comforting to see him and to be welcomed and then served, you know, a heaping plate of delicious Afghan food and—

34:00
George Gavrilis
But why didn't you tell him that if you feel so strongly about it?

34:05
Laura Tedesco
I don't know, maybe it's just a sense of, like, I'm a bit reserved around him. And I'm also aware that, you know, there is a kind of distance between us. He's an, you know, an older Afghan man and, and I'm just reserved in how affectionate and maybe vocal I would be. Although when I was leaving on Sunday morning, and I— saying goodbye, and I gave him a little hug, and we took some pictures together. And I said, Love you, Omar, it came out very naturally for me.

34:35
Laura Tedesco
He didn't say it back. I didn't expect him to, it was just an expression of my affection. And also, while I was with Omar, I hadn't even been there five minutes, and he immediately called Mr. Massoudi. So we were all on the phone together. And, you know, it just was particularly touching to me.

35:10

George Gavrilis
You've been listening to Monuments Woman with Laura Tedesco. I'm your host George Gavrilis. As we count down the final episodes of Laura’s journey into Afghanistan, we want to take a moment to thank you, the listener, for joining us on this journey. To stay in touch, follow us on Instagram, at the_monuments_woman.

35:30
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 is written by Ariana Delawari, featuring Salar Nader.

Ep 25: An Act of Defiance — Omar Sultan and the University of Chicago team

Topics Covered in this Episode
Raccoon from the roof
Omar Sultan, old friend
Working with Omar Sultan in the first years
Omar Sultan encouragement
Omar Sultan on creating permanent partnerships
George's alma mater University of Chicago
The National Museum and the University of Chicago
Hadda Buddha head reconstruction
The value of restoration
How much conservation is sufficient?
The most political project
Dream Team
The international University of Chicago team
What's next for the Hadda Buddha heads?
To see Omar Sultan again after many years

Recorded on January 5, 2022