Sixteen Years on the Danger List
Bahla Fort was the first Omani site UNESCO listed, in 1987, and it went onto the List of World Heritage in Danger the following year, where it stayed until 2004. The problem was not neglect. It was the repair — a generation of restoration work done in cement on a building made of unbaked mud.
You see the wall before you see the fort. It comes out of the edge of Bahla and runs off around the date gardens in both directions, mud brick on a stone footing, about twelve kilometres of it by the usual estimate, in every possible condition — squared and rendered where somebody has been at it recently, rounded off like a sandcastle where nobody has, and simply absent in the stretches where a wadi has taken it. That wall, the oasis inside it and the quarters of flat-roofed earth houses in the palms are all part of the World Heritage site. The fort on the rock is the photograph, but it is not the whole inscription, and the difference is the entire story.
Bahla went onto the list in 1987, the first site in Oman to get there. In 1988 it was moved onto the List of World Heritage in Danger, and it stayed there until 2004 — sixteen years, one of the longer stretches any site has served. What put it there was not that the country had forgotten about it. Oman had already started spending money on it. What put it there was how.
What was wrong with it
Bahla was the seat of the Banu Nebhan, who dominated central Oman from the twelfth century to the end of the fifteenth, and the fort is what five centuries of that leaves behind: unbaked mud brick laid on stone foundations, rendered in mud, roofed in palm trunks and fronds. A building like that is not an object. It is a maintenance schedule. The render sheds a few millimetres every year and has to be put back, the roofs have to be reset, and the whole thing survives only for as long as somebody with the right materials keeps turning up. Bahla had gone a long time without that. It rains almost nowhere in Oman and then it rains catastrophically in one afternoon, and a single cyclone can do a decade of damage to walls that were already soft. Sections of the fort had come down. Others were leaning.
The cement problem
The repairs reached for cement, because in the 1980s that is what everyone everywhere reached for. It is the wrong material on an earth wall and the reason is physical rather than aesthetic. Portland cement render is far stiffer than the mud brick behind it and close to vapour-tight. Moisture that used to leave through the face of the wall now cannot, so it moves sideways and upwards and sits at the boundary between the two materials; dissolved salts crystallise there; the render loses its grip and comes away in sheets, taking the original surface with it. Meanwhile the stiff skin cracks where the soft core moves, and every crack becomes a funnel that puts water in and does not let it out. The result looks like a rescue for about ten years and then costs more than the decay it was meant to stop.
An earthen building is not an object that can be conserved once. It is a maintenance schedule, and the only real question is who is still keeping it.
Sarooj, and the people who could still make it
The corrective programme meant going backwards on purpose: unbaked brick made from local clay, mud renders, palm-trunk roofing, and sarooj — the Omani hydraulic mortar produced by firing clay with wood and palm fronds, grinding it and slaking it, and used for centuries to line falaj channels and cisterns because it sets hard and holds water. The harder part was not the recipe. It was that almost nobody was building this way any more, so the work had to train its own labour before it could start, and it ran on and off for the better part of twenty-five years. The World Heritage Committee took Bahla off the Danger List in 2004. The fort itself did not reopen to visitors until 2012, having been mostly shut for decades.
What the Committee can actually do
It is tempting to read a Danger listing as paperwork. Oman has the counter-example on its own territory. The Arabian Oryx Sanctuary was inscribed in 1994; in 2007, after the government cut the protected area by around ninety per cent to open it to hydrocarbon prospecting and the oryx population inside it collapsed, the Committee struck it off the World Heritage List altogether. It was the first site ever deleted, and the deletion is what the process looks like when a state and the Committee simply disagree. Set beside that, sixteen years of missions, reports and revised methods at Bahla reads as the system working slowly rather than not working.
The part that is still going
A state can restore one large building. What it cannot do is compel several hundred households to keep replastering houses they have already left. The traditional quarters inside the inscribed boundary — Harat al Aqr among them — are private property, and the families who owned them have moved to concrete villas with air conditioning on the edge of town, which is a decision no one is entitled to be sentimental about on their behalf. UNESCO monitoring has kept returning to the condition of those quarters, and it is the same problem the fort had, minus the budget and minus any single owner to address it to. Walk out from the fort into the palms and you can see both halves of the argument in about twenty minutes: the restored walls, where the colour change tells you exactly where the old surface stops and the new work begins, and then the lanes behind them, where the same material has simply been left to go back to the ground it came out of. One of those is the argument won. The other is the argument still running.