A fireplace in Abkhazia, a Russian-backed breakaway area of Georgia, destroyed hundreds of work early Sunday morning, devastating a group that locals had cherished as a nationwide treasure — albeit of a rustic solely acknowledged as such by Russia and a few of its allies, together with Syria and Venezuela.
Virtually 4,000 work belonging to the Nationwide Gallery of Abkhazia had been destroyed when a fireplace swept by an exhibition corridor in central Sukhumi, the area’s capital, Abkhazia’s acting culture minister said in a statement.
The minister, Dinara Smyr, mentioned that these included 300 works by Aleksandr Chachba-Sharvashidze, a celebrated Abkhazian artist and stage designer, who labored with famend artists and theaters in Russia and France. “This is an irreparable loss for Abkhazia’s national culture,” she mentioned. The Nationwide Gallery is extra of a cupboard space than a museum, nevertheless.
Residents rushed to the scene on Sunday to rescue work, however solely 200 artworks had been faraway from the burning constructing. Pictures from the scene, launched by Apsnypress, an area information company, showed people carrying framed canvases, some charred and burned.
Native regulation enforcement officers mentioned they had been investigating all attainable causes, together with arson. The director of the gallery, Suram Sakaniya, blamed a brief circuit for the hearth, in response to the information company.
Abkhazia, a mountainous area on the Black Sea with a inhabitants of about 245,000, is internationally acknowledged as a part of Georgia. For the reason that late Nineteen Eighties, its standing has been disputed, and the dying Soviet Union stirred up tensions between the ethnic Abkhaz and Georgian individuals who each populated the world on the time. In 1994, after a bloody warfare of secession in opposition to Georgian forces, Abkhazia enacted a Structure declaring itself a sovereign state.
This was adopted by many years of disaster, underfunding and neglect. Lots of the area’s resorts, as soon as famed all through the Soviet Union, have been deserted and fallen into disrepair. Native authorities promised to construct a devoted constructing for the gallery, so the artwork could possibly be displayed frequently, but it surely by no means materialized. The Nationwide Gallery needed to retailer its total assortment crammed collectively in a number of rooms on the high of the exhibition corridor utilized by the native union of artists. The hearth destroyed the constructing’s roof and your complete ground the place the works had been saved.
In 2008, after a five-day warfare with Georgia, Russia acknowledged Abkhazia as an unbiased state. Moscow established a full-fledged navy base within the area and has been holding sway over Abkhazia’s politics and funds. Georgia considers Abkhazia to be below Russian occupation.
In 2016, talking in regards to the gallery’s state in an interview with an area information web site, Mr. Sakaniya, the director, characterised his establishment’s premises as “not suited for storing paintings, nor exhibiting them in any way.”
In a press release on Monday, President Salome Zourabichvili of Georgia blamed the hearth in Abkhazia on “the neglect of cultural identity both by the de facto leadership and the Russian occupants.”
The hearth was “a tragedy for us all,” Ms. Zourabichvili mentioned in a statement on X.
Established in 1963 as a part of a regional state museum, the Nationwide Gallery of Abkhazia collects works by native and Russian artists. Russia’s Tradition Minister, Olga Lyubimova, promised to send Russian specialists to help restore the surviving paintings.
However Mr. Sakaniya, the gallery director, informed Apsnypress that the injury would hit exhausting at Abkhazia’s sense of itself. “It is impossible to assess the damage done to the Abkhaz culture,” he mentioned. “I walk around and I cry.”
