PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti - Three murals of the Episcopal Trinity Cathedral, the only ones that remain after last year’s earthquake, are being saved.

Haitians were heartbroken by the loss of the others; all 14 had been internationally treasured. Painted in the early 1950s , they depicted biblical scenes from a local point of view: Jesus carrying a Haitian flag as he ascended to heaven; and a last supper that does not portray Judas with darker skin than the other disciples, as some paintings do.

The Reverend David Cesar, the church’s main priest and music school director, said the image of Judas, with the white beard and wavy white hair often assigned to God himself, was his favorite. In a partnership between the Episcopal Church and the Smithsonian in Washington, all three surviving murals will be protected in a climate-controlled warehouse in Haiti until they can be redisplayed in a new home.

The painstaking 18-month project began in the fall, with conservators analyzing how the fragile paintings were bound to the walls (weak mortar) and the materials that were used to paint them (egg tempera).

The other collapsed murals seem to have disappeared. “We have only about 10 percent of the 11 murals that fell,” said Stephanie Hornbeck, the chief conservator with the Smithsonian. “ There’s nothing you can do.”

Wooden beams now hold up tin and vinyl to protect the surviving paintings, and the hammering and scaffolding bring smiles to a city where reconstruction is practically nonexistent.

“My whole identity is here,” Mr. Cesar said, and here, reconstruction means more than architecture: a full artistic life is also being rebuilt.

The Episcopal Church of Haiti was founded by James Theodore Holly, who led about 2,000 other black Americans to Haiti in 1861 . He and his sons founded “what was actually Haiti’s first national church, and the first Episcopal church founded outside of the Anglophone world,” said Laurent Dubois, a historian at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

The eight muralists also had American ties. Many trained at an academy founded by an American, DeWitt Peters, who came to Haiti in 1943.

Haitian bishops and priests “gave them the liberty they needed,” said Mr. Cesar. Some Christians saw links to voodoo in the images, but for many Haitians and art historians, they represented one of this country’s proudest cultural moments.

The earthquake ruined much of that. Only “The Last Supper,” “Native Procession” and “The Baptism of Christ” survived - and each work bears the wounds of the vicious tremor that killed 300,000.

Mr. Cesar said he had little doubt about whether the paintings would be fully restored. He said that religious leaders are planning to create a garden for the murals. He said it was the only way to move on.

“We have to live with it,” he said, staring at the piles of rubble. “We have to learn how to live with it.”


By DAMIEN CAVE