When the shelling was over in Afghanistan and the Islamic fundamentalists finally had succeeded in destroying what were thought to be the world’s largest ancient statues of Buddha, a spokesman for the ruling militia merely shrugged off the international condemnation of this shameless obliteration of the country’s pre-Islamic heritage.

“This is totally an internal religious edict that has been excessively exaggerated in the outside world,” said a spokesman for the Taliban, the hard-line Muslims who have ruled most of Afghanistan since 1996 and who consider the relics an idolatrous violation of the Quran. “All we are breaking are stones.”

On the snowy other side of the world in Bangor, Julian Orr shakes his head in disbelief and frustration at the latest news from Afghanistan. Sitting in his modest home, surrounded by art that tells of his far-flung adventures in public administration, Orr examines a large, framed photograph of a scene no one will ever be able to witness again. It shows the biggest of the two colossal Buddhas that were carved at least 1,300 years ago into the sandstone cliffs rising from the Bamiyan valley, west of the capital city of Kabul. At the foot of the 170-foot statue is a tiny Volkswagen Beetle and a lone figure standing beside it, staring up at the awesome ancient presence, a figure that had withstood the assaults of Genghis Khan and centuries of war before being erased forever from the landscape by the Taliban.

Orr took the photo nearly 40 years ago, when he went to work with the Afghanistan government after serving as city manager in Bangor and Portland. The fact that the massive Buddha and its twin are now gone, along with most of the other evidence of the country’s rich pre-Islamic past, represents more than just the disturbance of a treasured personal memory for Orr.

“It’s a disaster for all of us,” he said. “These Buddhas are, as far as I know, unique in all the world. They represent an entire period of Afghanistan history that has now been wiped out by the Muslims. They were truly magnificent, and the world is poorer for their destruction.”

When Orr first took his family to Afghanistan in 1962 to work as a consultant with the nonprofit Public Administrative Service of Chicago, the country was a peaceful kingdom. Orr and his team spent three years helping Afghan officials to modernize their distribution of public services and to increase revenues. Orr also helped to draft the country’s constitutional monarchy.

“I went because it sounded exciting,” Orr recalled of the period. “Two of our children wound up graduating from high school in Kabul. My wife, Jean, was the principal of the international school.”

The family traveled freely throughout the country, often camping along the fabled spice routes of antiquity. On one such trip, the family visited the giant Buddha, dressed in its Grecian toga and gazing in stony serenity across the valley as it had since A.D. 2.

“It was huge,” he recalled, “a very impressive sight.”

Orr later worked in Thailand before moving back to the United States to resume his city manager role in Grand Rapids, Mich., and Rochester, N.Y. He returned to Afghanistan in 1971, and moved five years later to Ethiopia and then Nepal. The Afghanistan he and his family knew began to change quickly after the last visit. First the communists seized power, then the Soviets who invaded in 1979 eventually were repelled, leaving the Muslim factions to fight among themselves for control of the ancient land. In an effort to purge all evidence of non-Islamic existence, the regime even plundered the national museum in Kabul, once one of the richest cultural repositories of antiquity in the world. And through it all the giant Buddha stood, a symbol of the transitory nature of rulers and the enduring spirit of beauty. Until recently, that is.

“I had never seen anything like it before,” Orr said, looking at the photograph.

And now, because of a ruthless exorcism that international leaders have decried as “cultural genocide against humanity,” the world will never get to see it again.