Memorizing Lost Cities

War uproots life and civilizations and turns legitimate residents into overnight refugees and migrants. As part of a project on re-telling stories of disappearing cultural heritages of the Middle East, migrants and refugees from Iraq and Syria settled in the pockets of Europe since the Islamic State’s control of their home and countries in 2014, narrated several ways in which they carry their native cities with them. Some like Hana Mosaky who along with almost all the Christian inhabitants of the northern Iraqi city of Qaraqosh fled the city due to the attack has sown her city in a wraparound dress. Over four months she has embroidered Qaraqosh’s heritage against a bold background of red-and-black checked fabric carrying images of the church of St. Mary al-Tahira, the nearby monastery of Mar Behnam, the city’s agricultural fields and their traditional wedding dance. Her name is inscribed on a corner in Arabic while the other corner bears the name “Bakhdida”. It is how Qaraqosh is known in her native Syriac language. The city left behind is similarly memorized by Majeda, another refugee from Damascus who opened a Syrian restaurant in Paris that serves regional specialties like kibbe and covered the restaurant tables with the famous Damascus aghabani tablecloths and hung wall-frames with views of the Syrian countryside. For her, cooking food for all was a way of holding onto the memory of large communal meals they used to share in Damascus. Yet another who was a professional singer in Iraq and has migrated to Jordan, continues to sing in Syriaq-the Aramaic dialect spoken in northern Iraq in an effort to stay connected. Physical estrangement thus seldom severs ties—be that with people, cities or countries.