Current:Home > ContactWorld War I memorials in France and Belgium are vying again to become UNESCO World Heritage sites -WealthSphere Pro
World War I memorials in France and Belgium are vying again to become UNESCO World Heritage sites
View
Date:2025-04-12 14:43:30
ZONNEBEKE, Belgium (AP) — With war ravaging Europe’s heartland again, the countless headstones, cemeteries and memorials from World War I are a timeless testimony to its cruelty. Belgium and France want them recognized as UNESCO World Heritage sites to make sure people stop and think.
They bring pause and introspection to just about everyone visiting the sites dotted along the former battle lines of the 1914-1918 Great War that killed some 10 million soldiers.
At 12, Robin Borremans is dreaming of becoming a helicopter pilot in Belgium’s elite Special Forces. At the Tyne Cot cemetery, where 12,000 Commonwealth soldiers are buried row upon row, his perspective on life and death, war and peace, is being honed.
“It makes you so very quiet when you know what happened in this war,” he said as he took a break from walking between the rows of the fallen. “It’s really terribly impressive.” He and his party planned to visit a cemetery for Germans, the erstwhile enemy, later that day.
It is because of that impact that both nations want UNESCO to include the area on its famed list of sites along with the Great Wall of China, Peru’s Machu Picchu and Greece’s Acropolis. A decision on the issue is expected to be made around Sept. 21 during UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee meeting in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
The area has 139 sites spanning western Belgium and northern France and has been a living history almost since the guns finally fell silent in 1918. In neighboring Ypres, “every evening — every evening — of every single day since the 1920s there has been a couple of people blowing a horn out of the Menin Gate,” where the names of 54,000 soldiers who were never found in the chaos spawned by the war are engraved on its walls, said Matthias Diependaele, heritage minister of northern Belgium’s region of Flanders.
“That is the idea of commemorating every individual lost life in that war,” he said.
But that is not necessarily enough to achieve such lofty recognition, UNESCO has already ruled. To the dismay of the two nations, it snubbed their request in 2018 with the advice of the International Council on Monuments and Sites marking its conclusions with comments like “several questions,” “lack of clarity,” “too narrow and limited” and “shortcomings.”
As well, it was long perceived that a site like the Auschwitz Birkenau German Nazi concentration camp in Poland should stand alone as witness to the horror and suffering and not be a precedent for a long list linked to wars.
That was five years ago and now, Diependaele said, “I believe and I’m counting on the fact that the ideas inside UNESCO changed and that now there is more a context of openness.” And with the 1 1/2-year-old Russian invasion of Ukraine, “the world has changed since then as well. And maybe there is a lot more understanding for the necessity of the defending of peace.”
Since the war in Ukraine started, several of the institutions linked to the memorials and cemeteries have begun initiatives to support the embattled nation.
As in World War I, casualties are also being counted in the tens of thousands, though, fortunately, the overall rate is still much smaller. The sense of loss though, remains the same.
“We get so many people coming through here and making that link with Ukraine just because it is so relevant at the moment,” said Erin Harris, a guide at Tyne Cot. “And you’re seeing the same situation happening — with these two sides fighting endlessly.”
“And you come here to a place like this and you really see, well, this is still happening,” Harris said. “And, you know, not much has changed.”
veryGood! (68555)
Related
- Nevada attorney general revives 2020 fake electors case
- Horoscopes Today, February 15, 2024
- Atlantic Coast Conference asks court to pause or dismiss Florida State’s lawsuit against league
- A birthday party for a dying father chronicles childhood before loss in 'Tótem'
- Jamie Foxx gets stitches after a glass is thrown at him during dinner in Beverly Hills
- Amy Schumer Reacts to Barbie’s Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig Getting Snubbed By Oscars 2024
- Man who told estranged wife ‘If I can’t have them neither can you’ gets life for killing their kids
- 'Navalny': How to watch the Oscar-winning documentary about the late Putin critic
- This was the average Social Security benefit in 2004, and here's what it is now
- Warm Winter Threatens Recreation Revenue in the Upper Midwest
Ranking
- Trump issues order to ban transgender troops from serving openly in the military
- What's Making Us Happy: A guide to your weekend viewing
- How did Caitlin Clark do it? In-depth look at Iowa star's run at NCAA scoring record
- New York State Restricts Investments in ExxonMobil, But Falls Short of Divestment
- Small twin
- 'Footloose' at 40! Every song on the soundtrack, ranked (including that Kenny Loggins gem)
- Oregon TV station apologizes after showing racist image during program highlighting good news
- Body of deputy who went missing after making arrest found in Tennessee River
Recommendation
Head of the Federal Aviation Administration to resign, allowing Trump to pick his successor
What does a total solar eclipse look like? Photos from past events show what to expect in 2024
Austin Butler Makes Rare Comment on Girlfriend Kaia Gerber
She fell for a romance scam on Facebook. The man whose photo was used says it's happened before.
Average rate on 30
A man is charged in a car accident that killed 2 Chicago women in St. Louis for a Drake concert
Bella Hadid Gives Rare Look Into Romance with Cowboy Adam Banuelos
American woman goes missing in Madrid after helmeted man disables cameras