The Armenian

Amina and Wasila

            Ya Mohamad, your childhood home was in Tell Abyad, or White Hill: a two-storey house with a red-tile roof that looked north over orchards of pomegranate hedged by damask rose, and to the south, fronted a village square ringed by shops. One of these belonged to Wanis, the Armenian undertaker, who taught your mother Amina to play the oud. You would gather at the shop to listen to plays being broadcast on his radio, the only one in the village.

Your mother could never remember the exact day—or season, or year—in which you were born. It was most likely in February 1945. You were presented to your aunt Fawzia for her to raise; you lived your early years in your grandfather’s house. Your father saw the baby as a gift from God that he could claim back whenever he wanted; if he died, the child would carry his name—if it was a boy, that is. Your mother, an Aleppan, was a stranger to such traditions. She hated the way people in these little villages always kept each other under close observation, and never gave up her dream of returning to the city.

You remember being a little boy, helping your mother prepare the house to welcome her sister Wasila, come all the way from Istanbul. Together, you set out the tables and chairs, draping them with big white cloths. You took the guests’ china from the storeroom and polished the glasses. The arrival of the springtime visitor was celebrated in a verdant meadow by the Bride’s Spring, the source of the Balikh river.

Before you ever met Wasila, you had seen her in a photograph, posing on the shore of the Marmara Sea: a woman in her sixties in a bikini, a bottle in her hand; according to the handwritten note on the back, the bottle contained a secret letter for the sea to vouchsafe to God.

Amina’s chair

          Ya Mohamad, as a child you left the city of Aleppo where you were born, only to return as a teenager: from the spacious houses of your village, back to the world of stacked apartments.; back in Aleppo, as your mother had always dreamed. You lived in the Candlemaker’s Building on Doulab Street, a modest apartment of ninety square metres: a central salon with three bedrooms. The salon itself was what you might call a living room, furnished with couches that aspired to the taste of the mid-century Syrian bourgeoisie, and its walls adorned with a pair of reproduction oil paintings of the Swiss landscape. The television, of course, had pride of place here and was watched unblinkingly.

As a home, its contents were flexible, their function changing according to financial circumstances or the arrival of guests, with the exception of your mother’s chair, which never shifted an inch from where it stood. After your father passed away, she gave her bedroom to your newly-married brother Hamid, then to your brother Walid and his wife, so all her grandchildren were conceived and delivered on the same conjugal bed. Five boys, three girls, and four miscarriages, whose loss you never saw her mourn.

Hussein al-Shawi, the ironer

           Ya Mohamad, you soon moved out of your family home. You rented a place owned by your maternal uncle, on the modest income you made working for the clothes-ironer Hussein al-Shawi, in a neighbourhood know as “Below the Citadel”. You were there whenever you had time off school. You were fourteen, recently arrived from Tell Abyad where you’d dressed like the Bedouin boys: a jilbab that in summer you wore without underwear, free as any young boy in the innocence of your nakedness, because trousers would pinch that most precious of a man’s possessions, fruit and nuts alike.

It was in this ironer’s shop in the early 1960s that you first became close to the Syrian Communist Party. The ironer lent many books to you and other boys from your neighbourhood: the notebooks of Maurice Thorez and The Communist Manifesto, the novels of Alberto Moravia and Albert Camus. He led you on with knowledge until the then-banned party had you caught in its snare. You embraced Marxism as a way of life in which everything was subject to rational judgement. The other boys, who lacked any genuine leftist allegiance and were, in reality, closer to being anarchists, were the first to get government jobs. It was them who sent you Damascus at their own expense in 1963. They all contributed a share of their yearly wage to give you a monthly salary so that you could study fine arts in the capital while you looked for work. However, when at last you found a teaching position at a primary school the following year, the Ba’ath Party banned you from taking it because you were a communist student. Communists were not allowed in the army or education.

You were a progressive young man, a cook, who’d inherited from his mother a love of Aleppo’s cuisine and Sabri Moudallal’s songs in Aleppan dialect. You persuaded your fellow art students to come up onto the roof of the Faculty of Fine Arts building in Baghdad Street where you would strip down like sunbathers: if nude models were able to sit for the students downstairs, why couldn’t you get naked on the roof?

The neighbours saw you and called the police.

A greeting to Lenin

During your university days, you lived in the Glassmakers’ Quarter with a pair of charming fellow Aleppans, one an English teacher, the other a science teacher. When the secret police arrested you, the teachers both went to the house of Khalid Bakdash in Jisr al-Nahhas, to inform the communist leader that a comrade had been detained.

You had an agreement with them that if anyone of you needed the house, the other two would make themselves scarce. And you inserted a single condition: that you were prepared to fast if they would read The People’s Struggle, the Communist Party’s newspaper. It was a big house, close to the faculty: four bedrooms and a salon. They let you put on a group exhibition there, which you called “A greeting to Lenin”. One of the participants in this exhibition was Majed Sabouni, who used to wake up at five in the morning every day in order to attend dawn prayers at the Ummayad Mosque. But your communist comrades still hadn’t left the house by the agreed time of eight in the evening, and the teachers returned to find your gathering still in session, thick with cigarette smoke, booze and gossip and you, laughing as you asked the party secretary:

“How many members of the working class are there in Syria?”

The science teacher delivered a little speech to you all:

“I’m a Leftist, just like you all. I’m with Lenin and Stalin and Trotsky and whoever else you like. You’re all most welcome, gentleman.”

After graduating, you all left your art work on the attic of a friend who had gone to work in Libya. When he returned for the summer holidays, he found his house occupied by a military officer, who told him:

“I’ve kept everything you left here, the couches and chairs and tables. There were a few paintings here and there and up on the attic—I threw them away.”

Amina’s storeroom

             Ya Mohamad, almost no one found your mother’s habits remarkable, aside from the occasional visitor. Amélie Duhamel, your French wife, was one of them. Your mother’s eyesight had deteriorated, and if anyone gave her a gift, she would feel for her handbag and, calling over the closest person to her, would pass them the key to her storeroom, where the gift would be put away unopened. If it was a present of sweets or pastry then there was a variety of potential fates: the box might be squirrelled beneath her bed, or immediately opened and left out on the living-room table till it was emptied; otherwise, it was hidden away in the locked storeroom full of treasures, its consumption deferred to a later date, to join the other presents, arranged on shelves like a bank strong room—from boiled sweets to the bottles of perfume her daughters and daughters-in-law would bring her. And there was money, too: some gifted, some set aside to meet the household expenses.

Your mother raised you not to show your feelings, not to be too quick to let your emotions show. An absence of criticism was a compliment; if she wasn’t dressing you down, that was her highest praise. You were her eldest boy, and custom dictated that with your father dead, responsibility for the family passed to your shoulders. Sometimes, when you’d come from Damascus to see her, hours would pass without your expressions giving the slightest hint that you were happy to see one another. You were there, but it was as though you were yet to arrive. The expression of warmer sentiments would wait till the evening, for the feast of sheikh al-mahshi or quince kibbeh accompanied by your mother singing and playing and dancing. In any case, long, serious conversations were never the style in a house like yours, which was full of noise and guests at all hours. How to solve immediate problems was almost the only serious topic of debate, but when you were together, you and your mother would set these things aside , leaving them for phone conversations as rigorously scheduled and emotion-free as work calls. Your mother respected you, because your successes manifested themselves as an ability to send her money on a regular basis. She was less interested in what her other children sent her; for her, it was all heaven-sent, the rain that watered her garden. Elegantly-dressed amid the severe conservatism of her neighbours, it was thanks to her that your sisters resisted taking the hijab: a cultural turn that swept across Aleppo from the early 1970s, until it was crushed by the massacres of Hafez al-Assad.

Your mother grew old and lost her eyesight altogether; in her final years, she lost her hearing, too. It was the war that finally deposed the blind queen from her throne in the salon and sent her into exile: the house of brother Ziyad. None of you had been able to persuade her to abandon her kingdom for a more comfortable existence elsewhere. She was never convinced of the need to leave, arguing with you and refusing to cooperate, simply because she couldn’t see the destruction of her neighbourhood by a conflict that had torn the city in two; she couldn’t hear the crash of the missile strikes and barrel bombs that had forced the majority of her neighbours to flee. Venturing out for a sip of water and a scrap of bread, a sniper’s bullet could end a person’s life. Like prisoners, they were trapped in the cold, dark rubble, until at last they would decide to made a run for Turkey.

When you heard the news of her passing in the autumn of 2018, it was her beauty you thought of. You had always been captivated by her thighs, ever since you first saw them as a boy: swinging uncovered over grass in the courtyard of the house as, barefoot, she spreads washing over the pomegranate bushes. Thick grey clouds kept you company at the window of your seat on your flight from Paris to Istanbul, where she had died—on your way to the wake, too late for her burial in a city she’d never seen. Her beauty is still an ache in your heart.

The Euphrates and time

           Ya Mohamad, the directors of the foreign archaeological expeditions in Syria used pay one another visits, keeping up with the progress of their colleagues’ digs. You went to Tell Mardikh with Professor Orthmann, the head of the German expedition to which you were contracted as a draughtsman. You stayed there for three seasons, close to the city of Saraqib, making drawings for Paolo Matthiae’s Italian operation. From the bottom of a five metre pit you heard a voice call to you:

“Rumi! Guarda un po’!”

Allesandro, the architect, mounted a few rungs of the ladder and passed you up a plate. The colour drained from Orthmann’s face to see the young Italian flagrantly breaking the rules: he wasn’t being careful, wasn’t brushing away the dust. A lucky stroke from a small pick had exposed the edge of a gold plated dish, marked with an Eblan bull motif. It was as though the German professor, in his shock at the randomness of the pick’s blow, regarded the Italians and Syrians as a single, undifferentiated source of chaos. The archaeologists at the German Institute followed one of two main schools. The first was the Nazi school, which promoted the “scientific” nature of its belief in Semitic inferiority and primivitism. Orthmann was a graduate of this approach. The second, humanist, school, defended the achievements of so-called Semitic cultures, and sought tangible proofs that they qualified as “civilisations”. Among their number was Madame Strominger who, at Tell al-Miftahein on the west bank of the Euphrates, discovered a four thousand year-old road surfaced with naturally-occurring asphalt from Jebel Bishri, and transferred it to the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.

The majority of the workers at the Tell Mardikh site were women. One of them used to prepare you a freshly-cleaned and scented bed that you would find just as night fell, after an exhausting day beneath the sun. You uncovered the sacrificial altar of Ishtar’s temple and the bulging-eyed statues of the gods, one of them almost a portrait of the eyes alone. You uncovered the tablet depository of Ebla next door to the school building, which contained some fifteen thousand cuneiform tablets of narrative texts and ancient dictionaries, as well as a bilingual cuneiform lexicon in Akkadian and Ugarit. You fell under spell of the palace steps as they emerged from beneath the ground, their wood inlaid with ivory. Many jars were dug up, undamaged and broken, all five thousand years old. You were asked to draw the sherds only. In one month you drew ten thousand fragments of pottery.

Olivier Rouault made you technical director of the “L’Eufrate e il tempo” exhibition (Milan, 1993), tasked with selecting pieces from the Italian expedition’s work at Ebla. You noticed that the majority of the dig’s finds had not found their way to the displays and storerooms of the Early Bronze Age department at the Museum of Aleppo, but had left Syria, never to return, on the pretext that the expedition’s magazines were flooded. Some had been sold off before your very eyes.

Some pieces might be recovered later, the way that La Banque Française had returned The Horseman of Raqqa after the end of the Second World War, but numberless objects were taken and never given back. One is a potsherd in the Louvre that was excavated at Dura-Europos, the ancient site on the Euphrates near the city of al-Bukamal: a three thousand year-old pottery fragment inlaid with yellow glass, perhaps the earliest evidence of glass manufacture in the world. Glass was expensive and heavy, and was used for decoration and jewellery. Most probably, the art of glass-blowing was developed in Palestine and Syria a few years before the birth of Christ, making the glass clearer and lighter. During the Ottoman period, Venetian merchants would buy glass fragments from Damascus because of their low price. This is just a fragment of the research you presented in your film on glassmakers in the Levant.

There is a thousand-year wine cup from an Ottoman palace in Raqqa on which is inscribed: “Drink and sing; made in Damascus”.

A visit to the village of your childhood

          Ya Mohamad, the Syrian revolution brought you joy. In the autumn of 2012, you travelled to Urfa in Turkey to attend the burial of your nephew, who had been martyred fighting for the Free Syrian Army. You mourned his loss and the death of his promise, but your hope that Bashar al-Assad would step down was undimmed. The Kurdish YPG brought you across the border. It was the only time you returned to your village, where you were surprised to find a meeting of popular committees organised by residents: Arabs and Kurds, Turkmans, Circassians, and Armenians all working together, as diverse and unified as Syrian cuisine.

Tell Abyad was much reduced. You ventured a few steps onto the great bridge of your childhood over the Balikh: things had grown smaller as you’d grown older, but nothing had lost its magic. Durayd Azay, your Syriac neighbour and childhood friend, had been an expert at hunting moorhens with a slingshot, before he moved with his family to the Syriac Quarter in Aleppo. You used to wade out together towards your victim, bobbing in the shallows with a fractured skull. His mother would come round to visit with a bottle of the arak they distilled at home, while your mother prepared mezzeh.

Once, in Aleppo, you ran into a Catholic priest in the street. His face seemed familiar and you stopped him with a question:

“You wouldn’t happen to be Gabriel Basmaji?”

“Yes, I… Mohamad! It’s you!”

He hadn’t changed much. His father used to repair the gas stoves in the village. He laughed:

“They’ve elected me head of the Syriacs in Aleppo…”

“How did you end up like this? What happened to the mischief-maker I used to know? And where did our friend Khalif get to, the one who ran that donkey brothel?”

Khalif had tethered a jenny in the orchard belonging to the Syriac church, for local adolescents to come and lose their virginity. You used to make the following joke: on the Day of Judgement, every man would stand on the Straight Path followed by a line of all the women he’d slept with. The Angel of Judgement would write down all their names and interrogate each one. All the lines were moving through except the Bedouin’s, because he was followed by a great herd of donkeys.

“I left the business,” said Gabriel, “and went to Italy for two years to study theology. I derived all my strength from theology. I will show you a miracle and bring you to Christ. If you fetch me your son, I will make him talk to you while he sleeps.”

You accompanied your son Meyar to a hypnotism session in the priest’s office. The first thing he asked was,

“Are you of age?”

“Yes.”

“What a waste. It’s too late for you: puberty spoils the magic.”

You ask yourself: “We live eighty years, as the jahili poets say: we are burnt with fire, we burn, then we go out. What does our life weigh before the immensity of eternity?” You’d always thought that there would be time enough for you to complete at least some of all those deferred projects: more black-and-white photographs, a return to painting… and now, personal experience has taught you that the road a man takes matters more than where it leads. In the end, the road leads nowhere. Place is inside your head: the more you walk towards it, the further it recedes into the distance.

A funeral in the desert

              Ya Mohamad, during your military service in the mid-eighties, you headed the photography department in the political administration. You were paid a visit by the head of the air force. He was “humane”, as they say; a man called Haddad. As far as you’re aware, he was brother of the poet Da’ad Haddad. When he met you, he asked you for your ideas on how to bring photography to the barracks, about the possibility of buying developing and printing equipment. You went to see him in his office at the headquarters of the general staff where, alarmingly, he handed you a secret photographic archive of every purchase made by the Syrian Defence Forces. Putting his faith in your patriotism. You suggested taking pictures of Syria from the air for the Ministry of Tourism, an idea inspired by a Scandinavian calendar you’d seen.

Two months later you were discharged, and returned to your job in the French Institute for Arab Studies in Abu Rummaneh. One day, three officers turned up at the building and greeted you with a military salute, mistaking you for a French officer in civilian clothes, then handed you a letter that read, “Proposal: accepted”. Despite the fact that the armed forces were then conducting a mass mobilisation, and despite, too, the exorbitant costs of a single hour in the air, you were free to pursue the project, choosing the hours and dates that suited you. In total, you would spend thirty-five hours hovering over Syria in a military helicopter: pictures of the Euphrates, Arwad Island, the lime-white ridges and mounds of the dead cities, the sprawling fields of the plains of al-Ghab. When you developed and printed them by hand, the arable land looked like Bedouin patchwork, as though the fields were coloured squares of cloth stitched together. You had a sudden nostalgia for the non-figurative canvases you’d painted as a young man, and wished you had a studio where you could spend time alone, at peace.

One day, you were given a series of photographic plates at the French Institute. Aerial pictures of Syria taken by French army photographers. In the darkroom in your apartment in al-Afif, you started to print them. One of the plates, you realised, was covered with white spots; moths, you assumed, or some sort of fungal corrosion. You considered restoring it, and slid it under the enlarger to take a closer look. It was a funeral, seen from far away, and the white dots were the people gathered to bury a body in the desert.

The fortress of Jebel Sais

            Ya Mohamad, when you were taking photographs over the Syrian desert, you saw a series of lakebeds and marshes around Jebel Sais, spotted with black and purple. When it rained, the Bedouin would go there to water their herds. On the summit of Jebel Sais, inside the mouth of the extinct volcano, is a fortress the Ummayads built in the time of al-Walid Ibn Abdel Malik, its basalt walls surrounded by mosques and houses. Why had they placed it there, you wondered?

In the mid-eighties—in late spring, you remember—the minister of tourism, Nawras al-Daqr, lent you a Nissan four-wheel drive to visit the site. The terrain almost wrecked it, jagged volcanic rock either side of the road, only centimetres away from your tyres. To reach the fortress, you first had to pass through the dried lakebeds. One of them was five kilometres across; the vehicle whispered over the surface like an airport runway. You climbed to the summit to take panoramic shots of the grasslands and valleys, and as the sun started to set, you felt drops against your face. It had begun to rain: gigantic, dark purple clouds, fused together and blanketing the sky. You were suddenly conscious that you’d come out into this wilderness alone, with no provisions for the road. If you didn’t hurry, if you didn’t get out of here fast, you might end up stuck here for the rest of your life. Well, dead or alive. The dried lakes were insatiably thirsty; you could empty a tanker of water into one and it would immediately absorb it, leaving a slight stain on the ground. Terrified, you remembered that camels have sunk into these sands, unable to break free until they are swallowed whole.

In the distance, you saw the downpour erasing your tyre-tracks, your footsteps.

Registered mail

           Ya Mohamad, in the storehouses of the Pergamon you saw a jar like those whose seals you’d drawn in Tell Habbouba. You remembered a local Bedouin, a digger called Mohammed Miftah whose unerring ability to locate finds mystified you. He had learnt to write site reports in German without ever having set foot in a university.

How many of these clay jars you’d drawn back then, their mouths plugged with clay and stamped with seals, their pottery walls reinforced with goat hair. The village women of Jebel Ansariyeh used the same technique to make their pots into the late twentieth century; maybe they still do.

The cylinder seals have vanished; only their impressions remain: sheep, a woman churning milk, two men drinking—a fermented barley wine, most probably. You drew this last seal impression for the Dutch expedition of Hammam al-Turkman. You once had time left over to yourself after completing a drawing, so you started analysing the photographs you had, sketching out representations of the seal barrels themselves, their possible shapes and dimensions. Late, you would publish them. Three thousand years before Christ, these clay vessels were used to house the letters of the ancients, after their contents had been recorded onto a master tablet. Once the letter had arrived, itself written on a clay tablet, the jar would be broken, the way a pot is smashed at the bride’s feet at the start of a wedding processions.

The Armenian

             Ya Mohamad, you lived in Tanabir Alley, in Damascus’s Kurdish Quarter, among Circassians, Kurds, and Palestinians. Your neighbour was a vehicle mechanic in the Defence Brigades of Refaat al-Assad. Whenever he saw you, he would say, “I wish you success.”

Over the years, you have lived in sixteen different houses in the city, though the house you finally purchased was the first one you had rented in al-Afif, near the Salimi Mosque where Ibn Arabi is buried. From your house, you would climb Jebel Qasioun to the Kurdish Quarter and the waterwheels there: the al-Qaymari wheel on the Yazid River, and the waterwheel named for al-Jazari, the beautifully-illustrated manuscript of whose Science of Ingenious Devices (housed in the Berlin Library) so captured your imagination that you made a short film about him. You considered making a film about the astronomical drawings of Ibn al-Shater al-Dimashqi, who depicted the sun at the centre of the universe before Copernicus. The alleys of the Sheikh Mohyeddin neighbourhood and its surrounds were built with stone and other material from Irbil, and are home to the tomb of Khatoun, “The Lady of Sham”, sister of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi. Your love for Ayyubid architecture was enriched by the knowledge that Salah al-Din’s ancestors had been Armenian Kurds. The architecture in your neighbourhood was a record of all the historical eras through which it had passed: all history was contained in its stone and clay. You would see corbels shaped like the pilgrim’s scallop shell of Santiago de Compostela, and be transported instantly to the image of the shell itself. The basic form of things are beautiful, wherever and however they manifest.

You left Damascus in February 2011, never to return, entrusting the keys and your collection of pictures to your neighbour, the kunafa-seller. Your pen still lies on the desk in your study, next to a letter you never answered.

How many hours did you spend in the darkroom of that last house, developing film and printing pictures? You are true son of Aleppo in the way you practice your craft, inheriting the traditions of its market printers; such a champion of those professionals who did all their work by hand that your friends dubbed you “the Armenian”. An atheist, one of your favourite pictures is the icon of the Virgin painted by an anonymous master, said to be a pupil of Raphael, that hangs in the Armenian Cathedral of the Forty Martyrs in Aleppo.

The Armenians have lived in Aleppo and Damascus since the Mamelukes, and survivors from the genocide married into many different communities throughout Syria, changing their names in the process. When the country gained its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union, the first place their president visited was Syria. You once came across a lone masked Bedouin, standing guard outside the al-Hayr al-Sharqi fort in the middle of the desert. “I am the Armenian guard,” he declared to your surprise. Together you looked round the Ummayad-era building, with its fifteen square kilometres of brick-walled gardens. You saw the olive-oil press and the mill, then the complex system for receiving water from al-Kawm, al-Qadeir, and Tadmur: channels cut through the rock and roofed with stone, because the sun there desiccates everything. It certainly does not spare water.

Contrast Syria (Berlin, 2016) was an exhibition of large black-and-white photographs of craftspeople, stallholders and customers at the Haramiyeh and Manakhliyeh markets and Tanabir Alley, all in Damascus, then the ironmongers and lock-makers from Bab al-Hadid in Aleppo. You hung the pictures on the stairs that take you from the Pergamon to the Museum of Islamic Art. The claim that these anonymous characters were somehow marginalised or disadvantaged annoyed you; contempt and disgust can be an immediate reaction to simplicity and poverty. These are people, you wanted to say, in all their beauty and ugliness, their poverty and irrelevance and dignity.

In the Museum of Islamic Art, there are two small galleries before you reach the hall that contains the al-Mushatta Fort. Their glass display cases contain pages, paper objects, lit softly so as not to damage their fragile contents: illustrated Islamic manuscripts and icons whose minute size seems out of keeping in the vastness of the museum’s halls. You emptied these cases, replacing the contents with nearly twenty colour photographs of men, women and children, all Bedouin from the Euphrates river basin and the Jazira region, which you took during the 1980s and 1990s. Each image was slightly bigger than A4; the viewer forced to come closer to see them. You hoped that this proximity and the soft lighting would generate a kind of intimacy, a stimulus to the imagination; your concern was that they would look like postcard images.

You captured moments that you had already lived, because the subject of your photographs were your memories: an artist behind the lens embarrassed by your own insubstantiality, left uncertain by your lack of ego. Place is your subject and your memory. You judge photograph and canvas with the same eye: in their silence, both voice something ancient. Images see us and words hear us. Your art, which flows out of your fingers and eyes, your whole body, is a perpetual act of resistance against the pain that has wracked us. That said, it cannot compensate for any loss; rather, it gathers up the fragments of our memories, scattered over the long passage of the years. Your art defies the terrible distances with which the criminals have divided us, from our homes, from those we love. They divide us from the world and ourselves, and, as Syrians, from one another. Your art stands against the horrific violence that uprooted us and still tears at us to this day. It is, in its measured observations, a challenge to the hypocrisy of civilisation, which always conceals the worst of itself and justifies the worst of us.

Your transition from painting to photography happened by chance, one day in the early 1990s, when you took a photograph of your brothers, Walid and Ziyad, sitting in a cafe in Tell Abyad. Your use of the flash did not affect its impact. You were stunned by its innocence, and resolved to become a photographer. It wasn’t long before you had your first job, a replacement for the French photographer Jean Dufour, who had fallen ill while working for the French archaeological expedition at Tell Maskaneh. You swapped your first camera, a Hasselblad, for a Leica, whose precision lenses you had coveted. You once called Maison de Leica on Boulevard Beaumarchais in Paris, asking after a lens you couldn’t find in Damascus. When your son Meyar went to pick it up and send it to you, the seller gave him a forty percent discount. Meyar voiced his surprise, and the man said, “I’m an Armenian, born in Aleppo, and I know your father.”

That Armenians were photographic pioneers in the Eastern Mediterranean is widely known. The Abdullah brothers opened the first photography studio in Constantinople in the mid-nineteenth century, and in 1857, in Jerusalem, the Armenian Patriarch in Palestine, Yessayi Garabedian, founded the first photography school anywhere in the Levant.

Many of the postcards printed by your friend, the Armenian photographer Vahe Shahinian, were landscapes of Syria taken by you. Vahe had followed his father into the printing trade, and his postcards made some of your pictures famous: the Kaylanieh Bridge in Hama, with the waters of the Orontes still as a mirror (though this was prior to the events of 1982, when Hafez al-Assad’s forces destroyed the city, burying the inhabitants beneath the rubble); the salt-flats at al-Barida and al-Dawwara near Tadmur (before the al-Assad regime buried European nuclear waste beneath the sand, because civilisation is waste-recycling, too); the statue of the singer, Ornina, and images of the palace of Zimri-Lim at Mari; Halabiyeh and Zalabiyeh (the two forts that face each other over the Euphrates near Deir Ezzor); the basalt lion statues at Ain Dara; the silver figurine from Ugarit; the forts of Shmemis and al-Rahbeh, the palace of Beit Ghazaleh and the Qinnasrin Gate, both in Aleppo; the Castle of Ibn Wardan.

Your royalties from these pictures paid for Meyar to study cinema in France, as well as others: images of the ancient oil presses in Jebel Samaan, which you sent to the Museo dell’Olivo near Genoa; the pictures of the monastery of St. Moses the Abyssinian in Nabk, which appeared on the calendar of the German Archaeological Institute and were used by Father Paolo Dall’Oglio to persuade European investors to fund the monastery’s repair.

It has been a hard struggle, without ever enjoying a fixed salary. You have been hard on yourself over the years, through all your projects and experiments: you insisted on preserving the unassuming innocence of living creatures. You did not take it as a starting point, but sort to chance across it, alight with instinct, awareness and the far-flung net of delicate senses: that strange innocence regarding the struggle that the majority of artists engage in to dominate their material and demonstrate their uniqueness, their battles to win the limelight.

You are a shadow artist; you know that photography is the art of waiting for light, that the photographer hunts time—when the moment arrives he grasps its beam with his eye, his hand, his heart, moving swiftly without rushing so that it doesn’t lose its freshness. Its art is an orphaned moment; it has to be chosen carefully. Precision, not protestations of spontaneity or affectation and gimmickry. You never saw the need to burden that chance moment with grand ideas, to spoil its joy with the working-over and paraphernalia that distort the beauty of the visible surface, that claim to be penetrating down to a false profundity. You leave meaning as weightless as light in an empty room. A slight adjustment is sufficient to revive the soul.

You would know just where your pictures were to be found, and returned there at certain times of day, from dawn to dusk, freighted with your passion for the magic of tone and colour, waiting for light’s arrival or its departure, the way al-Yazidi waited for dawn to illuminate the first rock on the hill, to climb towards it in his white jilbab and kiss it—the kiss being a prayer of thanks to the sun. How fondly borne the tedium of waiting, how sweet the effort of climbing to what you love, when you see the light gradually unfurling over the floodplains on either bank of the Euphrates, the face of the world being sketched out before you.

The watchmaker

            Ya Mohamad, without the capacity for joy, patience would turn to despair. You’re fond of saying that though life shut some doors in your face, it has opened others.

In 1986, the Technical Institute of Antiquities and Museums opened in Damascus. A few years previously you had taught archaeological excavation techniques in the history department of the arts faculty, but a year into the course you had received a telegram banning you. It was the same reason as before: your Communist Party affiliation. It denied you the salary with which you supported your family. You enjoyed teaching your class of twelve students, handing them the keys to the job, and you all remain friends to this day.

You would talk to them about your own professor, the painter Huzakial Toros. Toros was born in Kharbut, which today is Turkish, though his family emigrated to Aleppo in 1916 during the anti-Syriac Sayfu massacres. His influence remained with you: his love of animals and fish; his passion for the Syrian landscape, its antiquities, and the old quarters of Aleppo; his precision and self-taught talent. An autodidact, he held his first exhibition in 1936, in the shop where he repaired watches.

The Tatars lay siege to the citadel

               Ya Mohamad, during life’s masked ball, enjoyable or terrifying as it may be, you have taken many photographs of the dresses and robes that are worn throughout Syria. You produced a film of textile workers as part of the celebrations for Damascus being chosen as the Arab Capital of Culture in 2008. In Fairouza, in the Homs countryside, you saw a Christian graveyard in an entirely Muslim village; the tax imposed by the Ottomans on the Christian villages had forced Fairouza’s Christian community to relocate to the neighbouring village of Zaidal, but they left their dead behind. Once, you were in al-Rasafa taking pictures of its ancient places of worship (the mosque of the Caliph Hisham, the Basilica of the Martyrs where Sergius, patron saint of the Christian Arabs, is said to be buried, and the synagogue) when buses arrived full of Assyrians and Yazidis wearing their traditional clothes and carrying their daggers. They were standing in the open air, against an ancient stuccoed wall, and you photographed them.

You were the costume designer for a production of Saadallah Wannous’s Historical Miniatures, staged at the Damascus Citadel in 1997, the year of the playwright’s passing. The director, Naela al-Atrash, sought to superimpose reality and history over art, choosing to place the stage in the actual site where the majority of the play’s events take place. As Tamerlane tightens his grip on the city, burning books and imprisoning scholars and craftsmen in the citadel, the slave-girl Rihana says, “They’re all Tartars here, and you and I are strangers.”

Returning to your archive of pictures and images of Mughal miniatures, you began to envision the clothes you were to design, then started to draw them. It was hard work; you still have the drawings in Paris. You borrowed the lightweight jacket of Hama that they call the qishtiyya, the long front skirt that is the Druze mamlouk, and from Houran, the coin-fringed red head-cloth known as the arja.

The fabric you sourced from Damascus’s historical markets: silk and linen, cotton and wool, and all of it Syrian. Like the silk for instance. The silk worms were bred in white mulberry plantations in Mashta al-Helo. In Homs, a machine separated the eggs from the cocoons and the threads were spun, then they were sold to the silk weavers and printers in Aleppo. You hand-cut the patterns yourself and supervised the rest of the work so closely that the tailors would complain: if a stitch was a millimetre or two out of place you’d send the work back. More than once, you reworked your design of Ibn Khaldun’s caftan. You did your best to spare the beauty and vivid colours of your costumes from the weight of the classical Arabic, grand ideas, revolutions, defeats, and historical coups that fill Wannous’s text. Syria’s share of historical unrest is truly impressive.

The play’s run ended one July night. The actors went home in their costumes and you never got them back.