Nearly 50,000 historical and manuscript monuments "went missing" during Ahmadinejad's era
Abdolnaser Mirchi, Director General of Cultural Heritage of Alborz Province, said that following the transfer of the country's Cultural Heritage Deputy to Shiraz during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, approximately 48,000 historical monuments and manuscripts have "gone missing."
On Thursday, November 19, Mehr News Agency reported, quoting Asadollah Darvish Amiri, Deputy for Legal Affairs and Parliament of the Cultural Heritage Organization, writing: "Valuable documents, books, and manuscripts that have been inherited from our ancestors were kept in the central library of the Cultural Heritage Deputy in the organization."
Referring to the transfer of the organization's Cultural Heritage Office to Shiraz during the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad administration, Mr. Darvish Amiri said that after that, the central library of this office was also transferred to Shiraz.
According to the official, "Unfortunately, after this transfer, historical books and manuscripts were kept in rice sacks and cardboard in the basement of the building where the Heritage Office is located... and they became prey to insects, rats, and also moisture and suffered serious damage."
This official from the Cultural Heritage Organization also said that with the coming to power of Hassan Rouhani's government, the collection of documents, books, and manuscripts from Shiraz was returned to Tehran and "was bound and restored by 50 experts within three months."
Previously, Ali Karami, an employee of the Cultural Heritage Organization of Iran, had reported that during the previous directors of the Cultural Heritage Organization during the reign of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, "47,000 copies of books, manuscripts, and thousands of historical photographs, along with archaeological reports, were "looted and destroyed."
This is not the first time that the issue of neglecting the preservation of Iran's historical and national monuments has made headlines.
During the Hassan Rouhani administration , it was also reported that officials at the Reza Abbasi Museum burned documents and correspondence from the Pahlavi era due to "lack of space."
Most of these historical documents were related to correspondence from the office of Farah Pahlavi, the last queen of Iran.
Hamid Baghaei, the head of the Cultural Heritage, Handicrafts and Tourism Organization from 2009 to 2011, has been in prison for some time now on charges related to financial corruption.
