1. Introduction
A number of studies have been carried out along with on-going work to document the damage at various archaeological sites and, to ascertain responsibility for the destruction1. According to the interactive map published on the website of the Directorate-General for Antiquities and Museums of Syria (DGAM), the total number of damaged sites and buildings in Syria amounted to 753 on April 21, 2016.
However, very few studies and statistics have addressed at once the impact of war on Syrian heritage and on the complex Syrian identity whose roots are perhaps as old as the Syrian national borders.
Discussing national belonging in Syria without taking into consideration how national borders were drawn by colonial powers is impossible, just as it is impossible to discuss a Syrian identity without contemplating the particulars of every community, whether ethnic, tribal, socioeconomic or confessional, and the existing bonds between people and places.
This text is based on personal experience, and aims to prove that people cannot be interested in their heritage or aware of it without an adequate foundation built on social interest and interaction, and that the preservation of a country’s heritage is an integral part of the sense of national belonging.
This article also aims to highlight the efforts of civil society to suture the rupture between individuals and heritage, after assessing their relationship before and after the popular uprising. Despite all difficulties, Syrian civil society has actually proven itself to be the most efficient actor in establishing this missing connection.
2. A Personal Path
I have an academic background in Archaeology and I excavated several archaeological sites in Syria. Between 2007 and 2010, I worked in Syria as a tour guide. At that time, I never pondered the relationship between heritage and identity. For myself and many other Syrians, archaeology was a purely academic, scientific matter that had no connection with current events.
And yet, the past is unavoidably linked to the present. While working as a tour guide, I would tell stories to foreigners about the significance hidden behind the appearance of sites and statues; stories about local modern cities as well as stories of the people living there. However, at that time, it did not occur to me to talk to the protagonists of these stories.
Subsequently, I have worked in the Middle East coordinating with civil society actors in Syria, i.e. all the non-governmental actors involved in collectively managing the crisis. It is thanks to this work and in the framework of the Syrian catastrophe that I started to question identity and its relationship with the past, ruins and all the ideas hidden behind ancient stones.
I decided to put things in order, to talk to people, to question myself and my interlocutors across three dimensions: archaeology, guiding foreign tourists, and civil society. This triangle became my compass that is still guiding me along a path yet to be defined.
These three dimensions have allowed me, first of all, to identify the main problem: The beginning of this catastrophe does not correspond with the outbreak of the uprising in 2011 and the ensuing war, but it is actually as old as our “homeland” (watan).
3. The Relationship between Syrian Citizens and their Heritage before the Uprising
“Syria is the cradle of civilisation”, “Syria is a religious, ethnic and cultural mosaic”, “Syria is the country of the first alphabet”. These are only some of the sentences that were taught at school under the curriculum established by the Baʿth party.
Schools were teaching the history of the most important sites in generic terms, in a way that did not clarify to the students the bond between the tangible site and its history, nor did they explain to them how they were linked to that remote site far away from their home.
In 2004, Jean-Claude David, a French urban geographer, asked a critical question: “To whom does this heritage belong? And who perceives it as heritage?”2
David’s article focuses on the fact that cultural heritage lies within practices, attitudes, lifestyle and architecture in the Middle East. “Living spaces represent a heritage only for foreigners, tourists and a minoritarian well-educated elite,” he writes3. That is to say, historical and cultural heritage is considered as such by those who observe it through the eyes of knowledge, unlike locals who live in that space and do not often see it that way.
Jean-Claude David describes the situation, but he does not mention the reasons why locals do not consider these spaces as heritage. David’s question raises further questions: What makes Syrians feel like citizens? When did they start to perceive themselves as Syrians?
According to confidential sources, some environmental associations conducted a survey directed to locals in Damascus in 2007. Among the asked questions, there was also the following one: "Why do you throw rubbish in the street?" Most of the people responded: "What do I have to do with the street?" Or "I clean my house, the state has to clean the street." The researchers have interpreted this response as a lack of sense of citizenship.
When the research report was published, the security forces modified the sentence by adding the adjective "environmental" to the word "citizenship". I am not sure whether a “sense of environmental citizenship” exists; however, it is not the topic of this article.
What I want to highlight here is that before asking about cultural heritage, one must question the existence of a sense of citizenship in Syria. Does a Syrian citizen perceive their town's streets as their own? How important is a small town in the province of al-Hasakah to a Damascene and vice versa? Perhaps my interest in Syrian regions, places and their stories is an effort to find an identity that I crave for myself. Or, perhaps, so I can acknowledge a part of this heritage and reject the rest.
![[Photo: Residential buildings of Palmyra and the angle of the temple fence. Early 20th century. (loc.gov/public domain)].](http://www.syriauntold.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/Old-Palmyra-7-1364x768.jpeg)
However, the residents were using the ancient Temple of Bel as a mosque4. That was their way to stay connected to heritage and to the territory. The link between citizen and heritage was severed with the restoration of the temple to its original use by actually taking away the mosque – the present of that time – from the past5.
Historically, another reason for this disconnect is a culture lacking acknowledgement of heterogeneity in Syria. Based on my personal experience, Syrians did not get to know one another in schools and in the public sphere. The local and central institutions did not make any effort to understand the regional particulars of social structures -- tribal, mercantile, rural, and urban.
Had Syrians been given local knowledge that allowed them to connect to many places, and thus create a sense of citizenship and belonging that extends beyond the abstract notions of a national map more unity may have existed.
Moreover, over the past decades, the Syrian context has been characterised by a deep lack of respect of basic human rights. Many areas have long been marginalised and left impoverished. As such, it is difficult to imagine Syrians appreciating the importance of the surrounding cultural heritage.
Nevertheless, despite the disastrous situation in Syria, there have been attempts even before 2011 that are worth mentioning. For example, the project designed by the association Friends of Salamiyyah (Asdiqa' Salamiyyah) in 2008 in the area of Shaykh Hilal6.
Shaykh Hilal, a village with traditional architecture at the edge of the steppe in central Syria, had been home to 1200 inhabitants, until it was damaged by the economic crisis which was triggered by a new law that prohibited agriculture in the steppe that same year. This led to an exodus of more than half of its residents.
The project designed by Friends of Salamiyyah was based on the traditional architectural model characterising the village, i.e. the architecture of mud of the dome-shaped houses. The focus was on the reconstruction of the houses but especially on developing local capacity to manage the project and receive tourists, in addition to the empowerment of women through the promotion of their craftsmanship.
Another example is related to a project partially conducted by the semi-governmental Syrian Trust for Development (al-Amanah as-Suriyyah lil-Tanmiyah). It was named “Creating a Cultural Map in Syria” and carried out between 2009 and 2010, starting from a pilot zone, the Wadi an-Nasara (Valley of Christians) in Homs governorate.
This project identified the most important local cultural resources and highlighted the relationship between local population and heritage with the aim of profiting from these resources in local development projects.
These are belated and limited attempts that have, nonetheless, attempted to strengthen the relationship between citizenship and heritage. They have focused on the core issue: making citizens understand the practical value of heritage. In this way, the desire of the residents to understand their history becomes a genuine desire, and something that is not the prerogative of intellectuals and elites anymore.
4. The Relationship between Syrian Citizens and their Heritage after the Uprising
A humanitarian catastrophe is unfolding in Syria. The numbers say it all. The Syrian Center for Policy Research (SCPR) published an important report on February 11, 2016. Data therein contained triggered surprise worldwide: 470,000 people were killed in Syria over the past five years, a double figure if compared with the most recent data published by the UN twenty-two months ago. According to the SCPR report, 6.36 million Syrians were internally displaced, more than 4 million had to flee their country, 45% of children are not attending school, overall economic losses amount to 255 billion dollars.
A Syrian intellectual once asked me a rhetorical question: “What is the point of thousands of years of history of my country if the destruction of a human being is taking place in every angle?”
![[Photo: Aleppo (Mahmud ʿAbdur-Rahman/Syria Untold)].](http://www.syriauntold.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/IMG_1528-1364x768.jpg)
For example, it has been almost two years that the people of ar-Raqqah live with foreign mujahidin who have their own “culture” and prevent the local people from observing local traditions when it comes to celebrations, clothing, meetings and proverbs. The relationship with the local heritage is, thus, reduced to the minimum and will keep diminishing as long as the war goes on.
At the end of 2015, a Syrian intellectual, Omar ʿAbdul-Aziz Hallaj, told me: “If I cover one part of the circle, you can anyway imagine the full circle because you have already seen it before. However, those who have never seen a circle in their life will never be able to imagine the hidden part and reconstruct a complete circle.” The children of Syria who currently live in refugee camps, who were born there, have never seen Aleppo’s Old City, or Palmyra; they have never seen the complete circle.
Notwithstanding its recent achievements and the numerous difficulties it is facing, civil society in Syria continues to represent the most effective form of resistance to the ongoing conflict. Since the consequences of the war will be felt over several decades to come, the results of the hard work of the civil society will likely emerge in the long term.
The ability to adapt to all conditions, especially in times of war, is certainly an advantage but, at the same time, is also a risk. Getting used to power failure, lack of water, fear, and the presence of criminals eventually implies getting used to a certain form of subjection. The commitment of the civil society is therefore critical since it represents protection and a rejection of injustice.
The brain drain, numerous abductions and enforced disappearances of activists have eventually weakened a Syrian civil society that needs more strength and a better structure in order to protect itself and safeguard its heritage, thereby restoring a balanced relationship with the surrounding context.
There is a risk – in the best case scenario – to follow the example of post-war Beirut, where the places of aggregation representing Lebanon’s identities were destroyed, leaving only a few mosques and churches standing. The city centre has in fact lost its Lebanese soul for the sake of luxurious residences and expensive shops affordable only to a few.
The population needs to relate consistently and actively to their own territory, and to participate in the decision-making process. Each socio-economic class needs to invest in its development. Only after recovering this relationship will it be possible to face the issue of heritage protection.
Despite the catastrophe that is currently tearing apart the country, the civil society operating throughout Syria and among refugee populations in Lebanon has launched important initiatives to protect Syrian cultural heritage.
In the eastern side of the Old City of Aleppo, which lies under the control of the armed opposition, activists have restored an ancient Khan from the 17th-18th century, transforming it into the Waraqa Cultural Center.
Following numerous meetings held to fulfil local populations’ requests, a desire emerged to create a place of cultural exchange, a place for meetings and education. Water and bread are undoubtedly not enough to ensure a sense of normality and peaceful co-existence. The population needs to nourish its soul and mind through cultural activities, such as workshops or musical evenings.
The project does not target only civilians from the local community but also armed groups. Most of the civil society activists tend to exclude fighters from their activities, whereas the founders of the Waraqa Center believe that these combatants are part of the local community, that can benefit from these types of cultural activities, provided that they come to the centre without weapons7.
The center has also managed to smuggle important books from Lebanon and Palestine via the Turkish border, or thanks to its contacts all over Syria. These texts were requested by the community, who indicated their preferences in a questionnaire.
Furthermore, the centre screens documentaries, organizes meetings with local council representatives as well as initiatives to combat illiteracy, and hosts wedding parties with traditional Aleppian music; Ahmad Habbush, the famous singer, has participated in these parties.
![[Photo: Inauguration of Waraqa Cultural Center - Aleppo Old City - 12-12-2015. (Mahmud ʿAbdur-Rahman/Syria Untold)].](http://www.syriauntold.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/ASA9796-1364x768.jpg)
The objective of the project is to create an identity memory linked to the nation of origin for children that did not live their childhood in Syria and to familiarize them with their historical heritage. This is happening through educational activities based on extracurricular learning, i.e. through games, songs and fairy tales. The objective lies in distracting children, even if only for a few hours, from memories of war scenes that are so present in their minds.
In this way, children realise that their origins are not rooted in the refugee camp where they live or in the city that is currently hosting them. Thus, all the children will have the opportunity to get to know their city of origin and describe to their friends its heritage sites, such as the Aleppo Citadel or the Orontes river8.
5. Conclusion
It is essential to understand today what local populations need, in every city and in every village. Although priority is given to projects involving schools, hospitals and humanitarian assistance, they should be complemented by projects that aim to create a relationship between people and the space they live in - both within tangible and intangible historical and cultural heritage - in order to be able to establish new foundations.
[Photo: Tadmur City (Palmyra) in the late 19th century. In the center stands the temple of the god Bel (it was used as a mosque). The outer walls of the church were reinforced and used to defend the settlement. (Loc.gov/public domain)].
