From buildings laid to waste by world wars to heritage sites caught in the crossfire of conflict, we remember some of the world’s landmarks rendered collateral damage as a result of human in-fighting. Some of these fallen wonders have since been rebuilt or repurposed, while some stand in ruins as monuments to history, heroism and peace. Others have sadly been lost forever.
Click through the gallery to see sobering before-and-after images of towers, temples, bridges and more damaged or destroyed by war…
Leuven University is the oldest institution of its kind in Belgium, with its original central library dating back to 1636. The library’s turbulent history began during the French Revolutionary Wars (1792-1814), when almost 10% of its rare books and manuscripts were confiscated and taken to Paris. Then, during the First World War, the building and its 300,000 precious volumes were destroyed in a catastrophic fire set by the invading German army. The library’s burnt-out shell is pictured here in 1914.
The attack on Leuven University Library sparked international outrage and supportive donations, which led to a grand new library building and bell tower being established on the site of the old one. But when war came to Belgium again in 1940, the university lost its (supposedly fireproof) library once more. It’s still debated as to whether the reconstructed building was purposely targeted by the Nazis or hit accidentally by the Allies – the bombing left only 15,000 books out of 900,000 unscathed. The restored library (pictured) reopened in 1950 and can be visited today.
Located in a lush valley in rural Afghanistan, the two standing Buddhas of Bamiyan were once the tallest statues of Buddha in the world. Carved into a rose-coloured cliffside during the 4th and 5th centuries, the monuments were painted and embellished with gemstones when they were first encountered by the Chinese Buddhist monk Xuanzang in AD 630. As time progressed, the spiritual and archaeological significance of the site grew among pilgrims and travellers. This photograph shows one of the statues as it looked in 1997.
But in 2001, the Buddhas of Bamiyan were demolished by the ruling Taliban regime, after its leader Mullah Mohammed Omar issued an edict to destroy all idolatrous statues across the country. Hauntingly empty niches in the rock where the pre-Islamic monuments once stood are all that remain – they have been protected by UNESCO since 2003 as part of the Cultural Landscape and Archaeological Remains of the Bamiyan Valley World Heritage Site. A third sculpture, this time depicting a sleeping Buddha, was rediscovered here in 2008.
Once one of the Maltese capital’s most impressive buildings, this Neoclassical marvel was designed in the mid-19th century by British architect Edward Middleton Barry – the man behind the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. Within a few years of opening, the venue (pictured here in 1905) suffered its first tragedy, when the auditorium caught fire during rehearsals for Giuseppe Privitera’s La Vergine del Castello. The incident severely damaged the opera house’s interior, which was painstakingly restored over four and a half years. The building reopened in 1877.
The Royal Opera House faced the final curtain in April 1942, when the Luftwaffe’s Stuka dive-bombers rained destruction down from the night sky, flattening much of the building. Its opulent interiors and most of its side walls tumbled to the ground, with rubble and debris spilling out onto the streets. Plans to rebuild the venue never made headway, and for a time its ruins served as a humble car park. But today they have been repurposed as an open-air performance space – Pjazza Teatru Rjal – so the old opera house still has breath for an encore yet.
Built over a decade during the days of the German Empire, Berlin’s Reichstag served as the seat of government from 1894 to 1933 and is today the meeting place of the Bundestag (Germany’s parliament). Tasked with designing a mighty edifice representative of the nation, architect Paul Wallot topped the Reichstag with a central steel and glass cupola said to be the first of its kind. But the building's fall from grace was colossal – rendered unusable by an all-consuming blaze in 1933, its neglected carcass provided an easy primary target for the Soviet Union during the Second World War. Seen here in 1945, the already ailing Reichstag was heavily bombed during the Battle of Berlin.
After being left mostly abandoned throughout the Cold War, the landmark's history-making cupola was so badly decimated that it had to be demolished out of concerns for its structual safety. Following the reunification of Germany, the building was eventually restored in the 1990s by famed British architect Sir Norman Foster. His striking replacement dome, displayed in this modern photo, helps make the Reichstag one of Berlin's most popular tourist attractions today.
For more travel and history features, why not follow us on Facebook?
The ‘Pearl of the Adriatic’, founded around AD 614 by Roman refugees, has witnessed much hardship and conflict in its long history. Dubrovnik’s medieval old town, largely razed by an earthquake in 1667, is encircled by fortified walls built between the 11th and 17th centuries. These walls, having withstood both natural disasters and war, are testament to the city’s resilience. Their strength was severely tested in 1991-92, when the Yugoslav Army laid siege to Dubrovnik (pictured) over the course of seven months during the Croatian War of Independence.
The old town, a designated UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979, endured considerable shelling throughout the siege. Among the cultural monuments damaged in the bombardment were Onofrio’s Fountain, the Sponza Palace and the Franciscan Monastery, as well as the historic harbour – pictured on fire in the previous image. Dubrovnik has since emerged from its costly restoration, though the scars of mortar attacks still pepper some of the blonde-stone buildings in the old town. Visit the Homeland War Museum, located on Mount Srd above the city, to learn more about this period of Croatian history.
The Church of St Dunstan in the East has sat tucked away in the City of London for some 900 years, but the building shown in this antique engraved print from 1817 is not the same one that first occupied this spot. Originally built around 1100 when England was under Norman rule, the church was ravaged during the Great Fire of London in 1666. Rather than undergoing a complete reconstruction, St Dunstan was sympathetically patched up and crowned with a Sir Christopher Wren-designed steeple.
The Gothic-style tower and steeple added by Wren were the only features retained after a major rebuild of the church during the 1800s. But the refurb was all in vain, for the Blitz of 1941 reduced St Dunstan to ruin, rubble and ash. Only Wren’s steeple and a few sections of exterior wall survived the Second World War, with the damage inflicted on the church deemed irreparable. Since the early 1970s, the bombed-out husk of St Dunstan in the East has served as a public garden – a hidden oasis in the midst of a heaving metropolis.
While Dubrovnik was fighting the Homeland War, the city of Sarajevo was embroiled in the Bosnian War, and was brutally besieged and blockaded between 1992 and 1996. An estimated 11,540 people were killed during the siege, which saw more than 300 shells hurled at the city each day. Nearly every building in Sarajevo was damaged, including City Hall, which was commissioned in the late 19th century to honour the nation’s Islamic heritage. Here, cellist Vedran Smailovic plays a piece by Johann Strauss among its ruins in September 1992.
The pseudo-Moorish building – influenced by the Mamluk-era architecture of Cairo – had fulfilled many different purposes before its destruction in August 1992. Since 1948, it had served as the National and University Library, but fire from the incendiary bombs that struck the hall gutted the bookshelves of their contents. City Hall’s recovery was slow, with its faithful reconstruction conducted in phases over an 18-year period. It opened to the public on 9 May (Victory in Europe Day) 2014 and has remained so ever since.
This harrowing photograph from 1944 captures the moment Prudential House was hit by a two-tonne mortar shell during the Warsaw Uprising. The 217-foot-high (66m) Art Deco skyscraper, completed in 1933 to house the Prudential Company’s headquarters, was then the tallest building in the city and one of its most modern. Seeking to free the Polish capital from Nazi occupation before the arrival of the Red Army, the Warsaw Uprising was exacted over 63 gruelling days, in which Prudential House was seized by insurgents and subsequently targeted by German artillery.
Though the explosion on 28 August 1944 wrought significant damage on the 16-storey high-rise and caused it to slightly tilt, its resilient concrete and steel structure did not crumble. The building was extensively renovated in the 1950s by its original architect Marcin Weinfeld and given a new identity as the Hotel Warszawa, which today provides luxurious five-star accommodation. It towers above Insurgents’ Square, formerly known as Napoleon Square.
One of the most complete monuments once preserved in this ancient desert city, the 2,000-year-old Temple of Bel stood in devotion to one of three chief Mesopotamian gods worshipped at Palmyra. Consecrated in AD 32, the temple’s hybrid architecture paid homage to Greco-Roman and Near Eastern influences, marked by grand Corinthian columns, altars and a sweeping courtyard. Pictured here in 1993, 13 years after the Site of Palmyra was inscribed by UNESCO, the Temple of Bel still looks amazingly intact after two millennia of life.
But in the summer of 2015, the temple was intentionally destroyed by Islamic State. The militants had taken control of Palmyra in May that year, and their reputation for demolishing and looting Syria’s heritage sites and archaeological monuments sparked fear for the city’s fate. Remarkably, the Temple of Bel’s portico survived the explosives, and can be seen in this 2021 image looming above the obliterated remains. Islamic State has now lost its grip on the region, but its trail of landmines left at Palmyra is hindering restoration works.
Once upon a time, a white porcelain pagoda rose from the grounds of a temple complex in China’s ancient capital. The product of 17 years of construction, the Porcelain Tower of Nanjing (shown here in a 1748 artist’s impression) was completed in the early 15th century on the orders of the Yongle Emperor and was considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Medieval World. Unique among other pagodas of the time, which were typically made of wood, this monument was composed of glazed porcelain bricks that gleamed in the sunlight.
But, unsurprisingly, the tower’s fragile structure was no match for violence. In the 1850s, it was wrecked – either strategically or out of superstition – during the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war between Christian rebels and the Manchu leaders of the Qing dynasty. Its ruins were only excavated in 2008, with the tower’s doorway (pictured) salvaged and later displayed in the Nanjing Museum. A modern steel and glass pagoda, unveiled in 2017, now stands in the same area as the original and is part of the Porcelain Tower Heritage Park.
London wasn’t the only British target to suffer Adolf Hitler’s merciless bombardment during the Second World War. Coventry, an industrial city in the West Midlands, endured its own Blitz on the night of 14 November 1940 – eerily codenamed ‘Moonlight Sonata’ by the Luftwaffe. The assault claimed 568 lives, 4,300 homes and the medieval Cathedral of St Michael, a building with 490 years of history. This sombre photo of the cathedral’s scorched remains was taken shortly after the smoke from the incendiary bombs had lifted.
Rather than attempt to renovate the old cathedral in the aftermath of the war, Coventry left its blackened skeleton completely untouched – its hollow nave and surviving spires still dominate the heart of the city today. The new Coventry Cathedral (pictured), consecrated in 1962, stands beside it, while a cross – fashioned from two charred pieces of timber from the original cathedral roof the morning after the bombing – is mounted on the altar of the ruin. Both are open to visitors and worshippers today.
The ruins of Nineveh, the last capital of the ancient Assyrian Empire, lie on the fringes of the city of Mosul, along the east bank of the fabled Tigris River. Originally settled in the 7th millennium BC, Nineveh later grew to become one of the most populous and affluent cities in antiquity. But in 2016, as conflict continued to sweep the region, two of the city’s gates (including the Mashki Gate, pictured here in 1977) were among several archaeological monuments demolished by Islamic State.
It was widely reported at the time that the Nergal and Mashki Gates had been destroyed at Nineveh, but National Geographic later confirmed that it was the Adad Gate that had been bulldozed along with the Mashki Gate. A lamassu – an Assyrian sculpture depicting a winged bull or lion with a human head – that guarded the Nergal Gate was also defaced by militants with a pneumatic drill. In 2018, a colourful reconstruction of the lost lamassu was erected on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square in London, a space always reserved for temporary artworks.
The name Mostar dates back to 1474 and comes from ‘mostari’ – meaning 'keepers of the bridge' – illustrating how the identity of this valley city is inextricably tied to its greatest landmark. Called Stari Most (‘old bridge’), the original stone arch was commissioned by the Ottoman emperor Suleyman the Magnificent in 1557 to replace a wooden structure over the Neretva River, which bisects the city. During the Yugoslav Wars of the 1990s, Stari Most was deliberately shelled by Croatian forces and went crashing into the water. In this image from 1995, a makeshift rope bridge stands in its place.
After the conflict ended, an international coalition formed to see Stari Most and Mostar’s decimated city centre restored. Using the same materials and building practices as the Ottomans would have in the 16th century, the old bridge was carefully resurrected over the course of three years, opening to the public in 2004. A year later, it became a UNESCO World Heritage property, along with the city’s historic heart. Today, Stari Most is famous for its divers, who spectacularly jump from the bridge into the river below. Bridge diving is traditionally seen as a rite of passage among local youngsters.
Built after the original Church of St Nikolai was lost to the Great Fire of Hamburg in 1842, the new church was consecrated in 1863. When St Nikolai (shown in this late 19th-century sketch) had its tower added in 1874, the building stood as the tallest in the world for a couple of years, until Rouen Cathedral surpassed it in 1876. Its bells first pealed in 1888, though were largely stilled by the First World War when all but the smallest bell in the carillon were commandeered for the war effort. But the worst was yet to come for the Church of St Nikolai.
During the summer of 1943, the air forces of Britain and America united for the so-called ‘Operation Gomorrah’, which culminated in five night raids and two day raids of Hamburg. The deadly combination of explosive bombs and incendiaries sparked a firestorm so severe that the flames forked four miles (6.4km) into the air. The Church of St Nikolai burned with much of the city, its last bell melting into oblivion. Only the church's steeple and fragments of its nave remain standing; the ruins were listed as a historical monument in 1960 and now serve as a memorial.
Hiroshima, prior to the Second World War, was a manufacturing hub with around 350,000 residents. Its Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall (pictured here in 1932) had been used as a place to exhibit and sell local products, as well as to host events, since 1914. But on 6 August 1945, the first atomic bomb to ever be deployed in wartime exploded in a mushroom cloud above the city, and the building became one of thousands laid to waste.
Dropped by an American B-29 plane, the notorious bomb instantly killed an estimated 80,000 people, while tens of thousands more later died of radiation poisoning. Five square miles (13sq km) of Hiroshima were levelled by the disaster; only the Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall is the sole-surviving piece of pre-Second World War architecture near the bomb’s hypocentre. Preserved today in the same state as immediately after the blast, the landmark – better known as the A-bomb Dome – is inscribed by UNESCO as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial.
Now take a look at these fascinating colourised photos from the Second World War