Every week it seems a new incident of tourist damage to priceless artefacts and ancient buildings is reported. Rome has been particularly badly hit this year by a spate of poor behaviour, including names being scratched into the Colosseum – a building that symbolises ancient Rome, is over 1,900 years old and considered one of the New Seven Wonders of the World – by a Swiss and a Brit.
But when is ‘vandalism’ interesting enough to become considered historical artefact itself? It turns out it helps if the perpetrator is famous, has tapped into the political zeitgeist, or if you don’t mind waiting a few centuries for your work to be discovered.
1. Cave Paintings, worldwide
Graffiti arguably goes back to cave paintings. Among the most stunning cave paintings discovered in Europe, we must include a cave in Altamira where there are Ice Age representations of bison whose colour and form would not be out of place in a modern children’s book.
Also breathtaking is the ‘Hall of Bulls’, discovered in 1940 in Lascaux caves in France, reputed for its monumental size, flow, and dynamism.
Ancient cave art like this is usually scratched into or painted onto rocks with ochre and charcoal. Subject matter often features animals, humans, handprints, and geometric symbols. Some are thought to communicate mapping. In Australia and elsewhere, much rock art is considered sacred by first nation communities.
After decades of enthused visitors, protections have now been put into place for many cave paintings to ensure these ancient ‘graffiti’ last for future generations.
2. Sacred spaces, Levant
Carving one’s own name into a space considered sacred is, it turns out, nothing new. Many examples exist across ancient Levant — particularly in regions of modern Syria, Iraq, Israel, and Jordan. The ancient Roman town of Dura Europos contains temples dedicated to local deities where a record of worshippers’ personal names and their pleas to the gods can still be studied today.
3. Tales of everyday history, Pompeii, Italy
In Pompeii, Italy where life and death have been preserved since a volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE, there are many examples of ‘everyday’ 2000-year-old graffiti that have become important records of how people lived. These include Lupanar, a building located near an intersection close to the base of Mount Vesuvius. Graffiti inscribed on the walls tells us it was a hub of social activity, with messages advertising sports as well as political propaganda mixed with those of everyday people.
Meanwhile, not far away on the walls of a Pompeiian drinking house, two men insult each other in competition over a woman, their love rivalry caught forever in time.
4. My God Help Me to Survive this Deadly Love, Berlin Wall
This mural was painted by Dmitri Vrubel on the eastern side of the Berlin Wall in 1990. It depicts a ‘socialist fraternal kiss’ between former USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev and German Communist Erich Honecker, and is a reproduction of a photograph taken in 1979 during the 30th anniversary of the foundation of the German Democratic Republic. Due to deterioration it was repainted in 2009.
5. Banksy, worldwide
It would be unusual for someone to complain about a work by street artist Banksy appearing on their walls, as it could turn out to be worth millions.
The mysterious British guerilla street artist seems to have travelled all over the world, installing his politically-charged throw-ups often in controversial places, such as on the 425-mile-long West Bank barrier considered illegal by the United Nations. Among the images created there, Banksy has depicted trompe l’oeuil ‘windows’ onto a world beyond which children play in sand, as well as a girl holding balloons that seem to be lifting her over the wall and a boy kneeling near a ladder thrown over the wall.
A museum in downtown Tel Aviv was reported last year as displaying a long-lost work depicting a sling-shotting rat on a concrete slab, an act that was described as ‘theft of the property of the Palestinian people’.
Banksy’s work ‘Love is in the Bin’ fetched the highest price at auction of any of his works, selling for £18.6m in 2021. It was created by purposefully shredding the print copy of his iconic Girl with Balloon stencil mural after it was auctioned off in October 2018. Other sales have raised money for the British national health service. But no matter how much Banksy tries to subvert the art world, his work is now fully embraced, and argued over, by the establishment.
6. Victor Hugo, Villers Abbey, Belgium
If, like Banksy, you’re famous enough, your graffiti will perhaps be preserved as social commentary or work of art. This is what happened when French writer, humanist and visionary Victor Hugo lost his temper with local vandals at one of his favourite places. Villers Abbey, about 50 km from Brussels, is an extraordinary site of 12th century ruins. Hugo even included the dungeons he found here in his writing. Deciding to beat the vandals who carved their names into the Abbey at their own game, he carved the following invective into the walls himself:
O fools! Foolish upstarts, o pitiful brood
Who walk here your foolish ignorance
And your vanity
Stop shouting at this admirable ruin
By drooling your names there which, like a vermin
Defile its majesty!
Hugo’s words have been moved but preserved.
