Floods that killed thousands in Libya’s east also inundated parts of the region’s sole UNESCO-listed site threatening the monuments with collapse, a recent visitor and a leading archaeologist said.
The immediate damage to the monuments of Cyrene, which include the second-century AD Temple of Zeus, bigger than the Parthenon in Athens, is relatively minor but the water circulating around their foundations threatens future collapses, the head of the French archaeological mission in Libya, Vincent Michel, told said.
The ancient Greco-Roman city of Cyrene (Shahhat) is located about 60 km (37 miles) west of flood-hit Derna.
Settled from the Greek island of Santorini around 600 BC, Cyrene was one of the leading centres of the Classical world for nearly a millennium before being largely abandoned following a major earthquake in 365 AD.
Its name lives on in Cyrenaica, the historical name for eastern Libya.
UNESCO declared its surviving monuments a World Heritage Site in 1982. When the overthrow of longtime dictator Moamer Kadhafi in a NATO-backed uprising ushered in years of conflict and neglect, UNESCO added the site to its World Heritage in Danger list in 2016.
According to Claudia Gazzini, Libya specialist at the International Crisis Group think tank, who recently visited the site, much of it remains waterlogged days after the torrential rains triggered by Storm Daniel on September 10 to 11.
Africanews.com
