Imagine the Prado museum without doors, No windows, Without vigilants, No police; A hungry population, Entering and coming out desperate after the shadow of tyranny and the violent awakening of a war. Imagine the people running in terror between Goyas and Rubens, looters in front of the Garden de las Delicias, unpunished thieves with Las Meninas ...
Something like that happened in April 2003, But it didn't take place in Madrid, but in the punished heart of Baghdad, With US tanks crossing the streets, imposing his power, but impassive before the unrecoverable tragedy that was happening in the National Iraq Museum.
"Everything has gone, all, In two days ... the identity of a country, Its value and civilization reside in its history », The archaeologist Raid Abdul Ridhar Mohamed lamented in the chronicles of those days. «If the civilization of a country is looted, As it has just happened to us, It is the end of the story. "
«If the civilization of a country is looted, As it has just happened to us, It is the end of the story. "
And Iraq's story is as vast as his unabarcable deserts. History, in fact, They started counting them, In the city of Uruk, With the first written texts of humanity. Assyrian heritage, Sumerian, Arabic and Ottoman accumulates in the crushed centuries under the Irakí Sun. And more than 50.000 pieces were plundered, damaged or destroyed. The harps of Ur, considered the oldest string instruments in the world, They were annihilated in the looting. It hurts to think that the gold lira, Ancient Mesopotamia symbol, over 4.000 years old, ended destroyed by a thug, A looter or a moron.
But this is the fate of this town, whose civilizations have been filling the libraries for thousands of years and whose vandals are able to ruin the entire legacy in a couple of days.
When we step on the museum in 2024, Some had recovered 22.000 pieces and most was protected in armored chambers. Still, We walk among the Assyrian reliefs, counting warrior deeds or contemplating the wake of Hammurabi, One of the first coded laws in history, A constitution carved with cuneiform writing in the year 1754 a.C. More 4.000 years after, The country where laws were sculpted and real tombs were decorated with golden harps, would be invaded by ISIS. It is the most primitive of fanaticisms, whose blindness combines with a destructive dementia, which shows that any form of involution can still degenerate even more. Mental note.
I wanted to say goodbye to Baghdad smoking a last Narguile in the Sabandar Café, where the distance is ephemeral and the inevitable conversation. No one is strange in Baghdad if they want to avoid it.
It hurts to think that the gold lira, Ancient Mesopotamia symbol, over 4.000 years old, ended destroyed by a thug, A looter or a moron.
But you had to get away from the capital to approach nothing, And in the middle of nowhere, suddenly, as a biblical shock, one discovers that he is in front of everything that was: The hanging gardens, The Babel Torre, The door of Istar ... Babylon can only be silent.
This is one of those places that must be completed with the imagination. You must paint the walls with the mind, Evoke towers where only a few stones remain. Because those stacked bricks were part of the mythical zigurat, The tallest building in the ancient world, The Babel Torre. And then a chill enters. You touch the bricks and think if it is true that that temple was built here, so insolent, that God punished men creating new languages, causing the incommunication of men and ruining the project. Without the legend, Babylon is a set of stones, But there is the legend and there is the story.
And then you see yourself with a Yerma esplanade, insult, With a few scattered thickets and the guide points to the field: "They say this is the place where the famous pendant gardens of Babylon were.". "Here? -You wonder- here, real!?”One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, The lush gardens that descended between staggered temples, surrounded by springs and flowers ... in this secarral?
One of the seven wonders of the ancient world, The lush gardens that descended between staggered temples, surrounded by springs and flowers ... in this secarral?
There were no other visitors at that time, There were no tourists. During that afternoon we only saw a Dutch guy, that he walked among the ruins as absorbed as us, so denied, imagine, imagine… We saw him a moment and then disappeared, As also vanished by the door of Istar, brick brick, Towards the Pergamo Museum, In Berlin. Here is a painted replica and the ancient semi -soured walls with their reliefs, that make you intuit the size of the city.
Iraq have been looting the past. You can only visit Babylon if you are able to dream it as it was.
There is another area in Babylon that seems much more rebuilt, with very high walls and bricks that are perfectly distinguished from the originals. Each of those new bricks carries, In Arabic, the initials of such a Saddam Hussein, who is who ordered rebuilding, more or less, Babylon. But the dictator's hand is much more visible than letters on the walls.
The ancient Babylon was built on the plain of Senar, A plain in which nothing is above or below and the horizon is a line of earth and dust in the distance. But not today, Today geography surprises us with a hill that did not exist, A mountain on a land without reliefs. And on that hill a palace from which to contemplate Babylon, Looking down.
The hill and the palace were raised by order of Hussein. Was his way of getting up on history, to look over, Even if the Babylonman was. In the delirium of every complex dictator there is always a pedestal to sustain the ego, an uprising in the shoes or an artificial hill on which to cement a palace.
Vicente Predel and Marián Ocaña are two good friends and eternal travelers, that they only see life in motion. They had passed through Babylon before me and recommended asking me for Maki. So Maki appeared smiling and accompanied us to the palace. Thence, We contemplate Babylon, An unprecedented view in the ancient world. Among the Babylonian palm trees, a. Maki pointed us out a small cement wall that surrounded a particular palm tree, Only one. “That was Saddam Hussein's favorite palm, So he ordered to tap his base and assigned his care to a man. That man was only dedicated to taking that palm tree ", Our guide said shrugging.
In the delirium of every complex dictator there is always a pedestal to sustain the ego, an uprising in the shoes or an artificial hill on which to cement a palace.
Saddam Hussein's palace was abandoned. There were dozens of painted in Arabic. The people usually express themselves with graffiti in the demolished palaces of dead dictators. It makes sense. Then we saw their painted vaults, His giant rooms. The stucco filigrants were intuited, The marbles and the wooden Aramboles, Although there was nothing left of the furniture. Our guide told us that in that year went mad from 2003, Some American soldiers participated in the pillage of the palace, Before Maki's outrage, that protested because that was, After the, Iraqi people heritage. But they reduced him vehemently.
More 20 years after, Maki took a key with which he opened a door, Like who opens a safe. We entered and a ladder rose to the upper floors. There we saw the bathrooms with their hot springs, The dictator's rooms and his entourage, With windows without crystals that appeared to euphrates. Only from the top it was possible to see the river. Everything was disproportionate, beautiful, obscene. And those initials in the signed bricks so that we do not forget the unreasonable who ordered to build that place.
I still had no tourists there. From one of the palace balconies, While contemplating what remains of the city of Babylon, I thought about the irremediable history of this place. The labeled greatness ends in the German museums, In American houses or hammering, by groups of fans.
Iraq is counted in ruins, But you can still count. You have to know how to read Iraq, Understand that this town is written between stones or museums and libraries. Today, Babylon is just a dream. But the Iraqis are still standing, rebuilding, and they reinvent themselves in the teterías. They are alive and know their roots, They know where they come from.
And we, That afternoon, We were clear where we were going: We headed to Iraq alive, a place where men and women go to their temples. There are no ruins or abandoned palaces, but crowded mosques. There they do not look at the past but the future in their prayers. We were about to meet the sacred city of Kerbala.
