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# Russian archaeology marks an event of world significance: a Russian monument, the cave paintings of Shulgan-Tash on the River Belaya in Bashkortostan, has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/otechestvennaia-arkheologiia-otmechaet-sobytie-mirovoi-znachimosti-v-spisok-vsemirnogo-naslediia-iunesko-vnesen-rossiiskii-pamiatnik-naskalnye-risunki-v-peshchere-shulgan-tash-na-reke-b/
- Published: 2025-08-04T10:57:30.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-01T05:29:12.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Archaeology, Heritage, Science, Nature

Russian archaeology marks an event of world significance: a Russian monument, the cave paintings of Shulgan-Tash on the River Belaya in Bashkortostan, has been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. I congratulate everyone who has had a hand in the work at the site and in its study, and all the researchers engaged with the subject!

It must be said that the long-awaited decision of the 47th session of the UNESCO Committee was preceded by many years of very difficult work by our scholars in preparing the monument for inscription on the World Heritage List, and not only in preparing it, but in preserving, identifying, studying and conserving the petroglyphs. The conditions were far from easy: first described as long ago as 1760, the cave had for millennia been a place of constant human visitation, and in the twentieth century it became not merely a sanctuary but a veritable tourist attraction. Despite its remoteness, thousands of people came here and were free to interact with the monument, damaging both the geological structures and the man-made objects. For a long time the cave had no special protected status, and even when it acquired one, open access was in practice not restricted until the 1990s. The cave was fenced off with a wooden fence and then with metal mesh, but the “tourists” persistently made their way inside all the same, at times inflicting irreparable or barely reversible damage.

Shulgan-Tash, or the Kapova Cave, is situated in the Southern Urals, in the Burzyansky District of the Republic of Bashkortostan, within the State Nature Reserve “Shulgan-Tash”, about 200 km from Ufa. At 3,328 metres in length, the cave is the largest cave site with rock art of the Upper Palaeolithic in Central and Eastern Europe and in the whole of Northern Asia. In the cave’s grottoes some two hundred drawings have been found, depicting mammoths, horses, a rhinoceros, a bison, a camel and other animals, as well as anthropomorphic figures and signs that are harder still to interpret.

Thanks to the years of work by Russian scholars, the monument was entered on UNESCO’s Tentative List as long ago as 2014\. One of the key teams engaged at the site is the Centre for Palaeoart of the Institute of Archaeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, led by Ekaterina Georgievna Devlet, Doctor of Historical Sciences and the leading Russian specialist in rock art, with whom I had the great good fortune to work in my time on the texts of scholarly publications, including those on rock art.

For a long time the UNESCO list included 42 rock-art areas (at least as of 2019); in 2021 two Russian monuments were added to it, the Petroglyphs of Lake Onega and the Petroglyphs of the White Sea. Now the Kapova Cave, too, joins the world-recognised areas of rock art with an exceptional iconography of images. But that is not all: among the Russian monuments of world importance, the outstanding petroglyphs of Sikachi-Alyan, also known as the Amur petroglyphs, on the bank of the Amur in Khabarovsk Krai, still remain outside the UNESCO list.

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