BAM, Iran, 29 December 2003 — Tears pour down the Iranian architect’s cheeks as he surveys the rubble and dust that are virtually all that remains of the historic city of Bam after Friday’s devastating earthquake. For 40-year-old Nematollah Khosh Daman the huge predawn quake took away not only the lives of tens of thousands of his countrymen but also one of the jewels of the world’s cultural heritage.
The city’s mud-brick old quarter, with at its heart an ancient citadel believed to date back to the Parthian era around the time of Christ, used to attract some 300,000 tourists a year, both Iranians and foreign tour groups. But now all that is left of the hilltop fortress are parts of the rampart and outer walls, which disintegrate and slide further down the slopes with every fresh aftershock.
“One could argue that this was one of the greatest heritage sites in the world,” said Daman, who had been working on the citadel’s restoration for the past decade as part of a huge project supported by the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization which had listed Bam’s old quarter as a world heritage site.
“Every Iranian will be heartbroken by this and anyone in the world who cares about heritage and culture should also be heartbroken. This is an absolute catastrophe in Iranian history,” the architect tells AFP, struggling to get out the words.
“I came down to Bam of course to help people but I also had to come to see this,” says Daman, who lives in the nearby town of Sirjan and survived the wave of destruction that virtually razed this city of some 100,000 people.
Many others working on the huge restoration project were not so lucky. Officials here said that all 100 or so curators, guides and other staff who lived on site were killed outright by the quake, buried under the mounds of earth and rubble that are now all that is left of the historic city.
For the last 24 hours mechanical diggers have been bulldozing a former waste ground on the western edge of this pulverized city, burying in mass graves hundreds killed in the devastating earthquake. Every minute, about four or five pickup trucks loaded with bodies drive on to what was days ago a dusty, sandy wasteland stretching for about four square kilometers in the southeastern fort city of Bam, an AFP correspondent saw.
About 10 mechanical diggers bulldoze the earth into long trenches as some 4,000 mourners crowd onto the site. Relatives kneel at the side of mass graves, some with their hands and heads bowed down in the dust, paralyzed in grief over the loss of loved ones. Most of the dead were adults, but there was one row of babies wrapped in blankets, none longer than 60 centimeters (24 inches).
Local imams, or clerics, provided what ceremony they could but the scale of the operation prevented the washing of corpses, or ablutions, as befits normal Muslim practice. The stench from rotting flesh was overwhelming, as people keeled over, vomiting everywhere.