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On the list: the pleasures and pains of UNESCO inscription
By Howard Swain; Slovak Spectator; March 20 2012
Perched on the altar of the wooden articled church in Leštiny, in the Žilina Region of northern Slovakia, are two figures unique in Christian iconography. In the early 1990s, after the fall of the communist regime, a spate of looting in some of Slovakia’s historical monuments accounted for the original, priceless versions of two statues of the brothers Aaron and Moses, which had stood in the church for hundreds of years. Wounded by their loss, the villagers of Leštiny commissioned a local carver to replace the artefacts, and he went to work to produce something vaguely akin to the prized and delicate whittlings of his artisan predecessors.
When the figures were completed, it mattered little to most parishioners that the carver had taken as models two slightly less than traditional forms. The result was that when Leštiny was added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2008, the statues of Aaron and Moses became the only UNESCO-protected garden gnomes in world. These multi-coloured, long-nosed chaps duly took their place alongside the Statue of Liberty, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid of Giza and the historic sanctuary of Machu Picchu as officially some of the 936 most significant cultural monuments on earth.
It was, of course, not exclusively the gnomic figures that attracted UNESCO to Leštiny. Rather the magnificent hilltop church in which they stand, which dates from the 17th century, is one of eight “Wooden Churches of the Slovak part of the Carpathian Mountain Area” that three years ago earned inscription on UNESCO’s prestigious list of cultural sites. Since its inception in 1972, the UNESCO World Heritage List has offered conservation and preservation to sites both natural and manmade, from the modern and ancient worlds, in 153 countries in all corners of the globe, including seven locations in Slovakia.