Since the outbreak of the Balkan war, three major events have taken place in what regards the protection of cultural property in armed conflict: the adoption of the Statute of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia which gives this court jurisdiction to try crimes against cultural and religious property; the approval of the Second Protocol to confirm and upgrade the obligations of the "1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict"; and, finally, the "2003 UNESCO Declaration concerning the Intentional Destruction of Cultural Heritage" motivated by the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 2001. While the latter two instruments have been exhaustively examined in scholarly literature, no updated study of the ICTY case-law exists yet. In this paper I go through all such cases and underline the following idea: the interpretation of ICTY has given rise to an involution and an evolution vis-à-vis the treaty law for the protection of cultural property in armed conflict; as well as to a doctrinal revolution by linking the destruction of cultural and religious property to the crimes of persecution and genocide. Since the interpretation of the ICTY largely diverges from the treatment afforded to cultural property in treaty law, I conclude that the protection of cultural property in armed conflict has by now a double life: one conventional and one jurisprudential