From Dya Dhwakha, the only surviving medieval gate of Kirtipur, to Tadha Bahi, whose sanctum in Lalitpur houses one of the largest cast Buddha statues in the country, and Shambhunath Mandir, the largest religious monument of Kalikot, a project has been steadily documenting Nepal’s heritages since 2018. Through photographic, iconographic and epigraphic studies carried out both from desk and field visits, this project, led by the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) at the Heidelberg University, has been building a database of Nepal’s monuments for the last three years.
Aptly titled ‘The Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP)’, this scheme is the brainchild of media anthropologist Professor Dr. Christiane Brosius and Indologist Professor Dr. Axel Michaels. Faculty members at HCTS, both have an immense love for Nepal and its rich history, which is why it caused them great pain to see so many heritage sites destroyed by the 2015 earthquake. And from that pain, they saw the need for documentation to ensure heritage preservation.
