The moai statues on Easter Island. Photo: Getty

I grew up in the 1970s in the quaint English city of Hereford, where our suburban house was near to the fine medieval cathedral. At least once a month, during my childhood, I would step inside the cathedral, to look, in particular, at one perplexing feature: all the statues without faces. Because the cathedral was full of them: from the blanked out 12th century figures dancing around the font, to the noble effigies of knights and bishops, their stone heads brutally hacked in half.
As a small boy, I had no idea what I was looking at, though I knew it disturbed me. Why erase human faces, on precious and historic artworks? It didn’t make any sense, but now, of course, I know that I was encountering a famous moment of iconoclasm: the mutilation of “idolatrous” Catholic monuments in the spiritual fires of the Reformation.
Today, sitting in my flat in London, I have been looking — once more perplexed and disturbed — at another iconoclasm (the word comes from the Greek: eikon, or image, and klaster, breaker): the toppling of statues around the western world, from Christopher Columbus in Virginia to Edward Colston in Bristol to King Leopold II in Antwerp. The latest vandalisation involved Italian journalist Indro Montanelli, and more is surely to follow.
As I write, this contemporary Iconoclasm of the Woke seems to be accelerating, particularly in Britain. There is a website advising the Topplers where else they might chuck statuary in rivers: maybe Sir Francis Drake in Plymouth, or Captain James Cook in Teesside. And it’s not just statues, for the New Iconoclasts are targeting street names, movies, sitcoms, art: one particular target, much lusted after by the Topplers, is the Winston Churchill mural in Croydon (a borough heavily bombed in the Blitz). At the weekend the threats of further iconoclasm, in particular against the image of Britain’s wartime leader, lead to large numbers of ‘statue defenders’ turning up in central London.
Where will this bizarre fury end, and how might it change us: as nations, cultures, peoples? To get an answer you need to examine iconoclasms through history, and in a lifetime of travel I have visited the scenes of several.
The earliest known iconoclasm took place at the awesomely venerable site of Gobekli Tepe, in Kurdish Turkey, a grandiose sequence of megalithic circles, constructed, it is believed, by hunter-gatherers just after the end of the Ice Age (around 11,000BC). Gobekli Tepe presents many profound mysteries, but one of the deepest is this: why, in 8,000BC, did the presumed builders erase their own magnificent monument, by entombing it with tons of dust, a task which might have taken decades?
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe