Monumental Damage / Real Life

• Out of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, only the Great Pyramid of Giza is still with us, and even then most of its outer limestone has been looted or eroded. The others had all been destroyed by the year 1500:
  • The Hanging Gardens of Babylon may or may not have actually existed, but they're definitely gone now.
  • The Colossus of Rhodes was destroyed in an earthquake in 226 BC, after standing for only 54 years.
  • The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus was destroyed twice. First, it was burned to the ground by some idiot named Herostratus in 356 BC. The guy's self-proclaimed only goal was to be remembered by history forever, and since we're talking about him over 2,000 years later, it obviously worked. Nevertheless, the temple was rebuilt, only to be sacked by Goths (not that kind) in 262 AD.
  • The fate of the Statue of Zeus at Olympia is unclear. It may have been destroyed in 426 AD when Byzantine emperor Theodosius II ordered its temple destroyed for being all pagan and everything. However, the statue itself may have earlier been carried off to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) because Constantine the Great decided he wanted it. According to this theory, the statue was destroyed in 475, when much of the city was wrecked by a great fire.
  • The Lighthouse of Alexandria was damaged by a series of earthquakes between 956 and 1323. Finally, in about 1480, the Citadel of Qaitbay was built on the ruins.
  • The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus was also destroyed by a series of earthquakes. Bodrum Castle was built on the ruins in 1494.
• The Library of Alexandria, one of the largest collections of written knowledge in the Classical Mediterranean, was accidentally burnt down during Julius Caesar's invasion of Egypt. The Romans rebuilt it, but it was burnt down again during the Third Century Crises.
• The Great Sphinx of Giza is missing a few of its original features, most notably its nose. Although some apocryphal stories attribute the loss to Napoleon's soldiers using it for target practice with cannons, they are false, as artistic depictions of the monument dating to the mid-18th Century also show it without the nose. One of the more likely theories pins the blame on Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim from the 13th Century who defaced the Sphinx's face in an act of iconoclasm. And, according to some local legends that persisted after the ignoble deed, there was a noticeable increase in the amount of sand around the Giza Plateau after the Sphinx's nose was removed, presumably as a vengeful curse to punish al-Dahr.
• The Turks used the Parthenon in Athens, Greece as a gunpowder magazine during the 1687 Morean War; the Venetians hit it with artillery fire and BOOM! The Turks knew the risk, because they'd accidentally blown up the Propylaea a few years earlier with stored ammunition, but they still used the Parthenon to store gunpowder and civilians. The Ottomans believed that the Venetians wouldn't attack the Parthenon. The roof of the Parthenon and supporting structures collapsed and 300 Turkish civilians died and the ruins were looted by the Venetians.
• During the War of 1812, the British burned Washington, DC. They explicitly targeted government buildings, including the Capitol and the White House. Urban legends state that the British generals sat down in the Capitol and voted on whether they should burn the place down.
• During the Greek War of Independence, Lord Elgin claimed that he obtained permission from Turkey to take several vital statues and relics from the Parthenon to England. He also used the fighting between Greece and Turkey during the Greek War of Independence as justification, claiming that he was protecting the relics from wartime damage. Many critics disagreed, including Lord Byron (who fought and later died in the Greek War of Independence) who felt that Elgin was a mere looter. The incident remains contentious in the 21st Century where the likes of Stephen Fry, George Clooney, and Matt Damon arguing that the marble structures be returned to Greece.
• In the Second Opium War, when a British delegation and escort was sent to the Emperor under truce to negotiate a surrender, they were captured, imprisoned, and tortured, and twenty of them killed. In retaliation, Lord Elgin (son of the Lord Elgin who took possession of the marble pieces from Greece) ordered the destruction of the Old Summer Palace (where looting had already begun before the incident), held to be one of the oldest and most beautiful examples of Ancient Chinese architecture. It took 3500 British and French soldiers three days to set fire to the complex, much larger than Vatican City and remains a contentious issue to this day.
• The St Mark's Campanile in Venice completely collapsed in 1902. And before you are wondering now why then it can still be seen on present-day photos (or when you are in Venice yourself) - well, it simply got rebuilt exactly as before.
• The Bolsheviks destroyed Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior in 1931 in order to make room for the Palace of the Soviets, a totally epic structure which would have been the tallest building in the world at the time (for perspective, imagine the Empire State Building, then crown it with a standing Lenin the size of the Statue of Liberty). They got as far as digging the foundation, but World War II intervened and derailed the project. Construction wasn't resumed after the war and, eventually, they just filled in the foundation with water to create a giant swimming pool. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the cathedral was reconstructed and today exists as it did before communism.
• World War II, the most destructive and extensive war in all of human history, has no shortage of examples of Monumental Damage, whether accidental or deliberate.
  • Hitler had a bone to pick and didn't hesitate to lord over the French for World War I after France's surrender in 1940. The French memorial park for WWI was destroyed on Hitler's orders, and the carriage in which the 1918 Armistice was signed was taken to Berlin. All that Hitler left standing was the statue of the French General Ferdinand Foch, who was left to look over the wasteland. A repeat of the trope on a much wider scale against many cultural sites in the city was averted in 1944 as the Allies closed in on Paris; General Dietrich von Choltitz was ordered by Hitler to destroy the city as he retreated, but the order was never carried out. There is debate about why this did not happen — Von Choltitz claimed he refused due to his love of the city as well as its pointlessness from a military perspective; others, remembering his prior atrocities, have found the prior point unconvincing. Still, others believe the Germans weren't capable of that level of destruction by that point in the war, but many museums, bridges, etc. were found to have been wired with explosives.
  • The British bombing of Lübeck, which was targeted not because of its military value but because it was filled with historic wooden buildings dating from the Hanseatic period that were easier to destroy than more modern buildings common in other cities, and the Nazi retaliation in the form of the Baedeker Blitz against Exeter, Bath, Canterbury, Norwich, and York, none were strategically important but all held many famous architectural buildings which were specifically targeted because of them. The latter was called the Baedeker Blitz after a comment from the German Foreign Office made a quip that the Luftwaffe would specifically target all the buildings in Britain given three stars by the Baedeker tourist guide.
  • The German bombing of Coventry was at least somewhat justified, as the city was a hub of the British automotive industry, and also hosted companies manufacturing aircraft, artillery shells, and machine tools. Still, the destruction of St. Michael's Cathedral shocked and enraged the nation. It didn't help when Joseph Goebbels invented a new word, coventriert (coventried) to describe how the city was destroyed and bragged how the Luftwaffe would "coventry" other British cities. The roofless walls of the cathedral remain as a memorial, and the replacement cathedral next door was consecrated with the premier of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem.
  • Warsaw suffered heavily from this trope after the failure of its uprising against the Nazis in World War II. In fact, in order to rebuilt its monuments landscapes of the city dating from the 18th century needed to be used as a model.
  • Close on Warsaw's heels in terms of wartime destruction, among Allied cities at least, is Manila, capital of the Philippines, which itself was subjected to a monumental (pun intended) case of this during World War II when extreme American shelling and ferocious Japanese house-to-house fighting practically levelled the old, Spanish/American colonial metropolis. Within the walls of Intramuros (its Citadel City core) alone, almost all of the grand old colonial-era churches and government buildings were mostly, if not completely, obliterated; only the San Agustin cathedral survived it mostly intact. The comparisons to Warsaw among destroyed Allied cities are well-known and often-shared. Unlike with Warsaw, though, Manila's record of restoring prewar architecture is … largely hit-and-miss.
    • In all fairness, however, this isn't entirely new to Manila (or many other Philippine cities for that matter); they and the entire archipelago they're on lie smack along the Pacific Ring of Fire, which means periodic volcanic eruptions and earthquakes galore. Many of those same, iconic Manila churches and public buildings, even before WWII, already have a prior record of cyclical destruction and rebuilding. (As recently as 1863 and 1880 there were major earthquakes, already with photographic evidence, that laid low belfries and even caused the total redesign of some churches.)
    • Going further back to early Spanish rule, the frequent and destructive earthquakes forced revisions to colonial building codes and led to the development of the unique, hybrid bahay na bato style, consisting usually of a stone ground floor and wooden upper floors. (Bahay na bato literally means "stone house" in Tagalog, but it's applied as well to those hybrid houses.) On the other hand, other colonial buildings were made exceptionally strong and durable, with squat profiles and detached belfries, in even more earthquake-prone locations; see the Ilocos region, where most colonial houses and churches are at their sturdiest.)
  • Shuri Castle, the political center of the Ryukyu Kingdom on Okinawa for four and a half centuries, was destroyed five times since it was first built, two of those times in the years after said kingdom had been annexed by Japan. During the Battle of Okinawa, with its underground complex being used by the defending Imperial Japanese Army as a headquarters, it was shelled for three days by the United States Navy and caught on fire for several days before United States Marines captured it. After the war the complex was eventually rebuilt and reopened to the public as a park in 1992...and then burned down again in 2019, this time by accident.
  • The Nazis anticipated this would happen to Munich during the war, and took extensive photographs of the city so it could be rebuilt to its former glory. In reality, Munich's postwar rebuild is rather Zigzagged. The city was bombed so much, that the reconstruction of the Bavarian Palace is still ongoing and is expected to be completed in the 2040s. Despite this, the four tallest pre-War structures still stand with only one taking minor damage (from an Allied Plane crashing into the spire, knocking the top part off). This is because they were aligned in the cardinal directions and Allied bombers would use the building as a compass to their target in the city, and purposely avoided this trope. The U.S. was able to find all the documentation of Munich in a bunker after the war and was able to rebuild it.
  • One side effect of the war is that over half the historical buildings in Germany will usually be replicas of the actual buildings that ended up destroyed in the war.
  • Berlin's monuments were not spared either. If you look closely you can still find bullet holes in the Brandenburg Gate and the Reichstag building, which were heavily fought over during the Battle of Berlin.
  • Much of the Nazis' own monumental architecture was built in order to Exploit this trope. Nazi architect and urban/industrial planner Albert Speer called it "ruin value" and argued that should the Thousand-Year Reich's millennium run out prematurely, the ruins of what they built should continue to serve as symbols of the glory that was Germany for thousands of years more, citing the ancient ruins of Greece, Egypt, and Rome (much of which are also listed here) as examples.
• The Iraq War claimed numerous artifacts and buildings, some dating back to the earliest human civilizations:
  • While the U.S. didn't bomb the Iraqi National Museum during the initial invasion, they neglected to secure the museum in the massive wave of looting that took place after the fall of Saddam's regime. Thousands of statues, vases, steles, friezes, and pieces of pottery were stolen or broken, while the Harp of Ur and an ancient Mesopotamian calendar considered to be the oldest written calendar in the world were destroyed. To date, only a fraction of the missing pieces have been recovered.
  • Al-Askari Shrine in Samarra, built in 944 AD and one of the most important Shia Muslim shrines in the world, was bombed twice by extremists in February 2006 and June 2007. Fortunately, the shrine's golden dome and minarets were restored relatively quickly and the building was reopened in 2009.
• On February 18th, 1965, 3 members of the Black Liberation Front (and one white French-Canadian women, a supporter of Quebec liberation from Canada), were arrested in New York for a terrorist conspiracy to destroy the Washington Monument, the Liberty Bell and the Statue of Liberty. The suspected mastermind of the attack was Che Guevera.
• Averted in the case of the Abu Simbel temple complex in Egypt, which was disassembled and relocated in 1968 to prevent it from being submerged following the construction of Aswan High Dam.
• The 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake damaged the upper deck of the eastern span of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge, as well as causing the Cypress Structure, a double-decker freeway in Oakland, to collapse. The hated Embarcadero Freeway along the San Francisco waterfront was so heavily damaged that it was demolished, with the city redeveloping the area with vintage streetcars.
• In 1992, a political rally of Hindu Right-Wing extremists attacked and destroyed the Babri Masjid, a four hundred and sixty-five hundred-year-old structure and an example of early Mughal architecture.
• The Giant Buddhas of Bamyan (Afghanistan) were destroyed by the Taliban in March 2001.
• The fall of the World Trade Center in New York City on 9/11, as well as the attack on the Pentagon (which unlike the Twin Towers managed to be rebuilt) and the planned attack on either the White House or the Capitol building. These targets were chosen specifically because they were highly recognizable landmarks that served as symbols of American power. This is a popular trope with terrorists in Real Life, as such landmarks are usually popular tourist destinations as well as having great sentimental value — successfully blowing one sky-high is a very effective way to get people's attention.
  • Even when the cause isn't terrorism, planes flying into buildings isn't unheard of. In 1945, a B-25 bomber accidentally flew into the 79th floor of the Empire State Building after becoming lost in fog. Ultimately averted, however, in that the crash did not seriously damage the building, although fourteen people were killed (including the crew).
  • In April 2002, just a few months after 9/11, a single-engine plane flew into the iconic Pirelli Tower in Milan, Italy, in what was later determined to be possible suicide.
• The Old Man of the Mountain in New Hampshire was a large granite cliff edge that resembled the profile of an old man's face. The formation was a famous landmark for centuries and a subject of Sigil Spam for New Hampshire, appearing on highway signs, toll tokens, license plates, and the state's quarter. Years of erosion took its toll on the cliff and the formation collapsed in 2003, much to the state's heartache. A memorial for the formation opened in 2010.
• The collapsed National Palace of Haiti◊ (basically the Haitian White House) after the 2010 earthquake. To give you an idea, this is what it looked like before◊. They say that the President was lucky he wasn't there when the earthquake hit.
• The August 2011 Virginia Earthquakes was felt as far north as New York and shook enough to cause damage to the Washington Monument, forcing it to close for almost three years as it underwent repairs.
• Big Tex, one of the Dallas area's most noted landmarks, was destroyed by an electrical fire at the end of the 2012 Texas State Fair.
• At the height of its rampage in the mid-2010s, the Islamic State was notorious for destroying several ancient ruins in the lands it conquered. Sadly, this was among the least of their atrocities.
• On April 15, 2019, Paris' iconic Notre Dame Cathedral was severely damaged in a fire. The blaze engulfed much of the upper part of the cathedral and caused the central spire to collapse.
• The Last Supper, despite being a world-famous painting, has suffered an astonishing amount of abuse over the centuries. With the combination of the unconventional painting techniques Leonardo used (making it less stable than a regular fresco) and severe environmental damage (moisture and smoke inside the chapel made the paint deteriorate; then there was the vandalism during the French Revolution, bombing during World War II, multiple bungling "restoration" attempts, and some complete bozo cutting a door through Jesus' feet), it's a wonder the painting has survived at all. The Other Wiki has the gory details.
• Some monuments (like e.g. The Noseless Great Sphinx of Giza or the Colosseum in Rome) have been in a damaged state since so long ago that said damage itself has become part of their iconic appearance. In fact, these ruins and others (such as the Parthenon) played a major influence on Albert Speer's theory of ruin value.
• By The '70s, the Hollywood Sign overlooking Los Angeles was falling apart. A picture of its dire state before its 1978 restoration serves as the page image for the Fall of the Studio System, showing it missing the last O, the first O having become a U due to damage, and the other letters all showing wear and tear, such that it looked like it said "Hullywo d".
• During the Israel-Gaza War of 2023, entire cities in the Gaza Strip were leveled. One of the more notable structures that fell victim to Israeli airstrikes was that of the Great Omari Mosque, the oldest mosque within the Gaza Strip.
• On March 26, 2024, the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed with dramatic speed after a cargo ship struck one of its main support pillars, killing an (at this writing) undetermined number of people and disrupting sea traffic at the city's port.