Works of art can travel many a winding road over time. Collections are acquired, and then dispersed, either through auctions or the ravages of war, its individual pieces carried off to one day join other collections, or perhaps vanish from sight entirely.

It is the fundamental human tragedy, the knowledge that all things must pass. But works of art, or entire museums, being destroyed, has a particular sting, perhaps because it is the basic ambition of artists to make, and the main aspect of the best art to be, something for the ages, something that outlasts and bears witness to those who made it and for whom it was made.

All things must pass. And few places have been as relegated to the past tense in recent times as the Chechen capital of Grozny. A recent UN delegation estimated that a full 90% of buildings in the city had been destroyed. Among them was The Grozny Museum of Fine Art, once home to more than 500,000 artifacts and works of art.

The conflict, which began when Chechnya declared independence following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, between rebel forces and the Russian government, which does not recognise the republic's right of secession, has left both people and property in a crossfire which has laid waste to the region.

Islamist Chechen rebels, animated by an extreme iconoclasm, which goes beyond simply the ban on depicting the prophet Muhammed, as seen in the recent cartoon kerfuffle, and sensing perhaps on some level the position of secular temple museums have been afforded in the West since the Romantic movement, sacked the place, even before major military hostilities broke out, as related in this article by John Varoli in The Art Newspaper.

For criminals it was a source of easy plunder, while for Islamic extremists, who were becoming increasingly powerful in Chechnya, it was home to a decadent culture that had to be eradicated.

What the rebels didn't destroy, the Russian forces made short work of when trying to retake the city. And though valiant efforts were made to rescue at least some of the works, the bulk of the collection must be presumed lost.

While the story of the museum’s destruction counts among the most ignoble cultural tragedies in post-1945 Europe, the saving of hundreds of works of art from the ruins by Russian experts is an untold heroic story. In March 1995, while fighting continued in Grozny, the culture ministry and the emergency situations ministry launched a mission to rescue the collection. Despite mines and sniper fire, Russian art experts found nearly 400 paintings in the museum’s ruins.

It is doubtful whether Grozny, once a cosmopolitan city where different peoples and faiths mingled freely, will ever rise from the ashes in the lifetime of anyone alive today. And the collection of art that once was housed there will assuredly never be restored.

On one occasion, the rescue team found a woman in the museum yard, crying and cleaning a small statue—she was the museum’s director, Nelly Shiryayeva.

“What restorers saw while sorting out the pictures from Grozny was shocking,” says Alexei Vladimirov, director of the Grabar Art Conservation Centre in Moscow. Pictures, furniture and other works of art were strewn around in the smouldering ruins. Paintings had been cut from their frames, or into shreds. Inspired by Islam’s stricture against images, Chechen vandals mutilated and slashed portraits and, judging by photos taken by the Russian culture ministry, those of women were especially targeted.