As a way to raise awareness of what the Sackler’s director, Chase Robinson, calls “the price that culture has paid to war,” the show feels particularly timely. Just weeks before it opened in January, President Trump tweeted about targeting cultural sites in Iran. His threat to destroy cultural heritage was criticized as illegal — not to mention comparable to tactics used by the Islamic State.

The Sackler’s first primarily virtual exhibition, “Age Old Cities” was organized by the Arab World Institute in Paris, where it opened in 2018, in partnership with UNESCO. It features four large-scale 3-D digital projections, each lasting several minutes, revealing the extent of these cities’ devastation. Almost entirely devoid of people, the animations digitally stitch together tens of thousands of photographs taken from 2017 to 2018 — both by drone and from the ground — along with archival images of some of the sites before their destruction.

The projections were created by the French start-up Iconem, which specializes in digitizing endangered sites, both to record them for posterity and to promote their conservation; it is working on surveying the damage from the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, among other projects.

In the Mosul projection, the camera swirls almost vertiginously, gliding over the flattened buildings, burned-out cars and piles of debris that made up much of the cityscape after it was reclaimed from the Islamic State. The 12th-century Great Mosque of al-Nuri — once famous for its leaning minaret — is shown in almost complete ruin after the Islamic State dynamited it in 2017. The projection then morphs into a ghostly 3-D re-creation of the mosque before its destruction, the architectural rendering rising from the rubble around it.

In an effort to convey the sites’ importance not just as landmarks but as living culture, “Age Old Cities” also includes video interviews with Syrians and a short film on Mosul’s multicultural fabric.

“Of course we are talking about heritage, but it’s also people behind this heritage, and also the question of immaterial heritage,” says the show’s curator, Aurélie Clemente-Ruiz of the Arab World Institute. “When a church or a mosque is demolished, the people can’t go there to pray anymore. It’s not just a building.”

A separate, three-minute virtual-reality experience — available only one day a month — transports visitors to five sites, including al-Nuri Mosque, Mosul’s Roman Catholic Our Lady of the Hour Church (ransacked by the Islamic State in 2016) and the Greco-Roman Temple of Baalshamin in Palmyra, built nearly 2,000 years ago, which the terrorist group blew up in 2015.

Particularly evocative is the VR section on Aleppo’s souk — considered the oldest in the Middle East, with portions dating to the 13th century — which was significantly damaged during Syria’s civil war. Peering through its dark passageways, you’ll see fire-blackened walls and trash piled everywhere, a couple of birds eerily fluttering around and even dust particles drifting up in the sunlight seeping through cracks in the stonework; it’s hard not to shudder at the feeling of utter desolation.

The VR component was designed by Ubisoft, the French video-game developer of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which is itself set in locations including medieval Jerusalem, Damascus, Aleppo and Cyprus.

While the video-game realism risks turning destruction into “infotainment,” the exhibition’s organizers hope that the digital reconstruction will help pave the way for the sites’ real-world restoration. Work has already begun to rehabilitate the Aleppo souk and, with UNESCO’s assistance, to rebuild al-Nuri Mosque.

“This exhibition is really to try to open the eyes of people to what is behind the conflicts that everyone can see on TV, the Internet and in the media,” said Clemente-Ruiz, “and maybe explain a bit more precisely what are the consequences for heritage.”

Age Old Cities

At the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, 1050 Independence Ave. SW. asia.si.edu.

Dates: Through Oct. 25. The VR experience is offered the first Saturday of every month from noon to 4 p.m. with the exception of July, when it will be the second Saturday.

Admission: Free.