ALIPH, the Geneva-based cultural heritage protection agency, has announced more than $16m in its latest funding round, with support going to Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan, as well as a dedicated focus on the effects of climate change on cultural heritage, primarily in Africa.
Nearly a third of the funding, or $5m, is going to Syria, which is seeking to redress the damage to cultural heritage sites during the war under the former president, Bashar al-Assad, who was overthrown in December last year. A new Director General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) has been announced, Dr. Anas Haj Zeidan. Syria has been restored to full membership in the Islamic World Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), though reports of illicit exports of cultural property in a still febrile environment are on the rise.
Valéry Freland, the executive director of Aliph, said he visited several cities, including Damascus, Aleppo, and Homs, and the Crusader-era castle known as Crac des Chevaliers, this April.
“The findings from this mission are clear,” he told The Art Newspaper. “Syrian heritage has suffered extensive damage from 14 years of war, as well as from the 2023 earthquake and the country’s economic and social crises. In Homs and Aleppo, for example, entire streets are in ruins or emptied of their residents, who fled the conflict. Yet today, there is a strong determination from the DGAM to take on the challenge of restoring and rehabilitating the country’s unique heritage. At ALIPH, we want to stand by their side – alongside heritage professionals and the Syrian people – to help revive this exceptional heritage in all its historical, cultural, and religious diversity.”
Over the next two years, Aliph will contribute to the restoration of heritage sites, monuments, museums and collections across Syria and support capacity-building in the country, Freland says. The organisation will also begin supporting the conservation of artefacts from Palmyra and the rehabilitation of the site’s museum.
ISIS’s drastic destruction of Palmyra, a Roman trading centre from the 1st century AD, was one of the violent acts that motivated international governments to form ALIPH in March 2017. Though the multinational organisation has previously funded projects in Syria, they are operating at greater capacity in the country now.
A commitment of $9m to address climate change is also significant. Aliph announced a specific stream dedicated to the climate emergency in its 2024 call for projects, in recognition of the growing threat that ecological change poses to tangible and intangible heritage worldwide. Though this connection is starting to be acknowledged—for example, as an increasing subject at successive COP meetings since 2022—Aliph has been one of the few cultural heritage agencies to prioritise it.
The agency will support 28 projects from the climate change funding call; of these, 22 are in Africa, an indication of the severity of climate change across the continent. Aliph's projects include the stabilisation of earthen architecture monuments, which are susceptible to torrential rain and flooding and to the loss of the local knowledge needed to sustain them as older people pass on or emigrate. A key example here is the fortress-like mudbrick houses built by the Batammariba people across the region of Koutammakou in Togo and Benin.
On the Isle of Mozambique, in another project newly supported by Aliph, the palm-thatch macuti architecture is similarly under threat because of the dissipation of local knowledge. Other projects will aid museums in collections conservation, and in Kenya, Aliph will help support the protection of sacred forests, again underlining the range of threats posed by climate change and the growing willingness of agencies like Aliph to consider plant and animal life as significant to the cultural life of a community and worthy of heritage protection.
Finally, Aliph is raising its support for emergency measures in countries at war, most notably Gaza and Ukraine. In the Palestinian territories, the agency is committing $500,000 further funds to protect museum collections, heritage and archaeological sites, and for training for heritage professionals from Gaza and the West Bank.
In Ukraine the agency is continuing to stabilise the museum collections that have been moved to safe houses in the western part of the country, where the conservation conditions, which were quickly implemented in the early days of the war, need to be improved three years on.