What happens to heritage and memory when a monument is wrecked? Who decides what to preserve, what to restore, and how a site should be restored? Questions of restoration and conservation are fraught with sociopolitical concerns; it is not a neutral act to choose to restore a site to its state in a particular historical period, given the numerous, shifting identities that many important sites have had. A monument is never static—it is something that changes as the society which inherits it changes. The Parthenon has served as a monument to both pagan and Christian icons. The Hagia Sophia was a cathedral, a mosque, and a museum. How, then, should a site be conserved? What parts of its histories should be restores and what parts of it left to fade?

There is immense power that lies in the conservation and restoration of cultural heritage sites. Selective preservation can be used to support certain nationalistic or imperial agendas—even now, we see that Erdogan’s decision to reconvert the Hagia Sophia into a mosque has carried significant ethno-nationalist undertones, harkens back to the day of empire, and signals Erdogan’s desire to position himself as an heir of a historical moment of significant imperial power.

It is clear that restoration and conservation must proceed with the utmost care. Decisions regarding the stewardship and conservation of world heritage sites should remain as free from aspirations to power for particular individuals, regimes, or nation-building efforts as possible. Though complete neutrality is never realistically a possibility, the employment and consultation of historians, academics, and archaeologists, whose interest in the preservation of a site is located outside of questions of power and spectacle, can mitigate some of the ways in which cultural stewardship of world heritage sites and important monuments has been manipulated and weaponized as a tool for particular social and political agendas.