---
title: An Assault on Architecture to Target a People
date: 2022-03-18T05:30:00-04:00
author: University of Maryland
canonical_url: "https://today.umd.edu/an-assault-on-architecture-to-target-a-people"
section: Articles
---
# An Assault on Architecture to Target a People

*March 18, 2022* — by [Maggie Haslam](/author/maggie-haslam)


> Embattled Regions Like Ukraine Must Also Grapple with Loss of Heritage, Say UMD Experts

*AP 22060498514024 1920x1080 — The regional state administration building on Freedom Square in Kharkiv, Ukraine, stands in ruins March 1 after the bombing of the city by Russia. Below, journalists tour Aleppo's Great Mosque, where a towering thousand-year-old minaret was destroyed in fighting between Syrian government and rebel forces.*

A few days after fighting in the Syrian civil war ripped the millennia-old minaret off the Great Mosque of Aleppo, Syrian blogger Amal Hanono [published an elegy](https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/syria/articles/2013/04/27/arts-culture-lessons-from-the-minaret) to the symbolic piece of skyline, now absent.

“They say that people make their cities,” she wrote in 2013. “But if you are from Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world, the city has made you much more than you have made it. So, when pieces of our history are destroyed one by one, pieces of us are lost, fragment by fragment.”

Now, Russian missiles and bombs are reducing important structures in Ukraine to rubble. It’s the latest example of how the architecture that defines a people’s history, achievement, influence and community has, for centuries, been a target for destruction, a treasure to be taken, and a statement of resilience.


*destroyed mosque*




**Topics:** [Research](https://today.umd.edu/tags/research)


**Tags:** [Historic Preservation](https://today.umd.edu/topic/historic-preservation), [War in Ukraine](https://today.umd.edu/topic/war-in-ukraine), [Research](https://today.umd.edu/topic/research)


**Units:** [School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation](https://today.umd.edu/topic/school-architecture-planning-and-preservation)