Russian-occupied Chersonese listed as World Heritage in danger

UNESCO's World Heritage Committee added the Ancient City of Tauric Chersonese and its Chora to its List of World Heritage in Danger on Wednesday.

“BREAKING! Just inscribed on the List of #WorldHeritage in Danger: Ancient City of Tauric Chersonese and its Chora,” UNESCO posted on social media. The committee announced the listing during its 48th session, which runs through July 29 in Busan, South Korea.

Chersonese lies within Sevastopol, on Crimea's southwest coast, in territory Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014 and has held since.

Dorian Greek colonists founded the city in the fifth century B.C., and by the third century A.D. it was the most productive wine center on the Black Sea, trading across the Greek, Roman and Byzantine worlds.

UNESCO added the polis and its surrounding chora — hundreds of rectangular farm plots laid on an orthogonal grid — to the World Heritage List in 2013.

Ukraine's National Commission for UNESCO laid out the case for the danger listing in a report submitted in January.

The report named illegal excavations, inappropriate development and artifact removal as the main threats to the site, along with what it called "governance issues under occupation."

Because UNESCO has no access to the site under Russian control, the Ukrainian commission said its account drew on satellite imagery and verified reports.

Much of the construction centers on New Chersonesus, a 140,000-square-meter museum and church complex that Russia opened next to the ancient ruins in July 2024.

Its museums include one devoted to "Crimea and Novorossiya," an imperial-era name Russia has revived for territory it claims in southern and eastern Ukraine.

President Vladimir Putin proposed the complex in 2015, the year after the annexation, framing Chersonese as the place where Prince Vladimir was baptized in 988 and Christianity spread to Rus.

Ukrainian officials say the building work has cut through the archaeological layers the listing is meant to protect, and that finds have been taken from the state preserve.

Objects have been "scavenged from construction debris" and may surface in online auctions, the January report said, and Ukraine has pressed UNESCO to document the artifacts and see them returned.

Some of the site's problems predate the occupation. When it inscribed Chersonese in 2013, UNESCO noted that some of the ruins were "highly dilapidated or even close to collapse," and no conservation report followed in the years after.

The danger designation carries no enforcement mechanism. It flags a site for closer monitoring and access to emergency assistance funds, and it can be reversed if conditions improve.

Chersonese joins three other Ukrainian properties on the list — the historic centers of Odesa and Lviv, and Kyiv's Saint Sophia Cathedral and Kyiv-Pechersk Lavra — all added in 2023 after Russia's full-scale invasion. Those sites remain under Ukrainian control.

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