When Walls Talk: The Graffiti From History

Germany’s Reichstag building covered in the scrawls of Red Army soldiers after they had captured Berlin in 1945, near the end of World War II.

Most of the writings, made with chalk or charred stumps of wood, were soldiers' names, and often their hometowns. Some troops left threats such as, “Hanses and Fritzes, you will never forget this. If necessary, we will come again.”

Much of the writing has been preserved, though the most obscene messages -- some referencing violent rape -- were removed.

Outside the Reichstag, a message left by Nazi loyalists had urged Berliners to fight the Red Army, promising passersby the bleak choice, “Victory or Siberia.”

Politically charged graffiti is likely as old as civilization itself. In the ruins of Pompeii, this caricature of a Roman politician is one of several lively and sometimes raunchy images scratched into the walls of the doomed city, which was buried by a volcanic eruption in A.D. 79.

A rampaging gladiator etched into a Pompeii wall. Merriam-Webster defines graffiti as “usually unauthorized writing or drawing on a public surface.”

In 1870, journalist Henry Morton Stanley etched his and his newspaper’s name into the ruins of Persepolis, in today’s Iran. A year later, the Welshman famously discovered the missionary David Livingstone in the African jungle.

A message on the walls of the former Gestapo headquarters in Paris. The note appears to include the words “I’m not sleeping. Thinking of my parents and my darling Louise.”

Graffiti on a wall in Tehran in 1979 representing Iran’s Shah (left) and a mullah. Two weeks after this photo was taken, Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini returned from exile in France to impose hard-line Islamic rule on the country that continues today.

Dummy Soviet soldiers on a mountain road after the 1979 invasion of Afghanistan. The sign reads, "The sisters of Shahr-e Naw" -- a neighborhood in Kabul -- "are crying, while the sisters of communists are prettying their eyes."

A Bosnian man runs across a street in Sarajevo that was frequently raked by sniper fire, in 1993. More than 5,000 civilians were killed during the nearly four years the city was besieged by Bosnian Serb forces who held the hills surrounding Sarajevo.

Two Chechen residents answer a census worker’s question outside their battle-scarred gate in 2002. Writing on the gate, which probably dates to the Chechen wars of the 1990s, says, “Peaceful people live here. Checked to be safe.”

Graffiti near Islamabad, Pakistan in 2003, shortly after U.S. President George W. Bush launched the invasion of Iraq.

A house in Tikrit daubed in graffiti in 2003 during the U.S. invasion. The Iraqi city is the hometown of former dictator Saddam Hussein.

A former Dutch peacekeeper visiting her old base near Srebrenica in 2007. The hand-drawn calendar marks dates from 1994-95.

Some 8,000 Muslim men and boys were killed in and around the town in July 1995 after Dutch UN protection troops failed to prevent Srebrenica’s capture by Bosnian Serb forces.

A Georgian soldier looks at a message left by Russian troops inside a base in Senaki after the 2008 Russo-Georgian war. The base was trashed by Russian troops who destroyed tanks and helicopters before withdrawing.

Drawings left by Taliban fighters inside a compound in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province in 2010.

The writing says, “Even though a parrot is in a cage, he can still savor being in a green place. Even though a man is in prison, he can still savor being in his homeland.”

In the same Helmand compound, U.S. Marines decorated the walls with their own art after capturing the base in 2010. A drawing of Marines raising the U.S. flag inside the compound. The text says, “THE FEW THE PROUD.”

An Indian policeman alongside graffiti in Kashmir proclaiming support for an Islamist militant who was killed by Indian security forces in July 2016. Kashmir is a disputed region that is the main source of friction between India and Pakistan.

A sketch of an Afghan militant firing a rocket-propelled-grenade at a helicopter in the Darul Aman Palace in Kabul, photographed in 2016.

A tank spray-painted onto the walls of the Darul Aman Palace. The building is today in the final stages of restoration after lying in ruins for decades. It is unclear whether, like the Reichstag's, the restoration will preserve some of the graffiti inside.