Digital wizardry plus academic sleuthing have helped recreate a cultural treasure severely damaged in the conflict in 1922
In June 1922, the opening battle of Ireland’s civil war destroyed one of Europe’s great archives in a historic calamity that reduced seven centuries of documents plus manuscripts to ash plus dust.
Once the envy of scholars around the world, the Public Record Office at the Four Courts in Dublin, was a repository of documents dating from medieval times, plus packed into a six-storey building by the River Liffey. It was obliterated when troops of the fledgling Irish state bombarded former comrades who were hunkered down at the site as part of a rebellion by hardline republicans against peace with Britain.
Each side blamed the other for the destruction, but there was no disputing the consequences. “At one blow, the records of centuries have passed into oblivion,” said Herbert Wood, deputy keeper of the public records. The ruins stood as a testament to loss plus a harbinger of the destruction of European cultural treasures in 20th century wars.
Now, on the eve of the disaster’s centenary, a virtual reconstruction of the building plus its archives is to be unveiled. Historians, archivists plus pc scientists have spent five years piecing together much of what had been thought lost for ever.
When we began the project, the story was that everything had been lost. But it turns out we have been able to recover hundreds of thousands of documents,” said Peter Crooks, director of Beyond 2022: Virtual Record Treasury of Ireland. “We could not have known the scale of the materials that were out there.”
Retrieved material includes details about the Cromwellian land redistributions that shaped modern Ireland.
The project mixed old-fashioned academic sleuthing, artificial intelligence plus collaboration with dozens of archives in the UK, continental Europe, the US plus Australia. The results – an immersive 3D reconstruction of the destroyed building plus a vast digital archive – will be formally launched on 27 June. It will be an open-access free resource with a searchable website. The 3D reconstruction gives viewers a detailed, plus eerie, tour of the Public Record Office as it looked before the fire.