One must work long and hard to arrive at the truthful. What I want and set as my goal is damned difficult, and yet I don’t believe I’m aiming too high. I want to make drawings that move some people … Whether in figures or in landscapes, I would like to express not something sentimentally melancholic but deep sorrow....
NAME: Suhail Sawa
EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND: Graduated with a Bachelor degree in Architecture, Syria
Personal Ambition: To be a referee in the World Cup
Can you explain your love for football (soccer)?
Since childhood, until today, soccer has been my eternal love and inspiration in life. Soccer gives me strength, determination and patience. It’s a miniature model of real life because in soccer, you...
- By Greta Medawar and Carissa Gilham
In May 2017, Shaam Group presented the inaugural Shaam Syrian Film Festival in Melbourne and Sydney with the objective of providing a platform for Syrian cinema to be screened in Australia. Sponsors of the festival included Melbourne travel agency, CedarJet Travel, and popular Sydney based Knafeh Bakery that specialises in Jerusalem street food....
Lena is an Armenian Syrian singer, composer and musician. Described as a Syrian ambassador spreading the jasmine voice of Damascus, she has performed in Germany, England, Sweden, Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Russia, as well as her home country of Syria.
She sings mainly in Arabic and Armenian, but also in Syriac, English, French and Italian.
Lena graduated from Damascus University in...
Elaine Rippey Imady, MSI Press, LLC, 2013
Traveling to Syria meant leaving behind my mother and my two sisters and uprooting myself from my small Hudson River town where my mother’s family had lived since 1765 …. I told my mother … that I had met the man I would marry and she laughed. Seven months later...
Book Review by Lisa Accadia
Daughter of Damascus by Siham Tergeman
Published by Center for Middle Eastern Studies, University of Texas at Austin, 1994
Damascus in my mind’s eye… is an Arabic house with an open courtyard, in its center is a small pool from which 70 brass pipes pour out cool water. A beautiful woman sweeps the courtyard with water, holding...
By Brigid Keenan, Thames & Hudson
Review by Charles Newton, ESL teacher and artist
My husband, a diplomat, was posted to Syria in 1993, and I went with him. Very soon, like Isabel, the wife of the famous British Consul Richard Burton, a hundred and twenty-odd years before me, I found myself in love with Damascus. (Long after she left Syria,...
by Leslie Hemphill
“You are welcome”, or “You are family” were words we heard so often in Syria when we travelled with daughter-in-law Ghada on three visits to stay with her parents and family in Damascus.
Ghada was one of six children raised in a little house - really a two-storey apartment. It was possible to climb out a window onto...
By Iskhandar Razak
A Syrian refugee granted asylum in Melbourne has started a magazine to give Australians a different perspective of her homeland, which has been ravaged by years of war.
Syria was once a nation of 22 million people and home to historic sites that predate the bible.
But now the UN estimates nearly 11 million have fled their homes after years...
My Country
- by Nizar Qabbani,
- translated by Norma Medawar
From the lisp of the
blackbird…
From the saddening
huskiness of the flute…
From the flickering sounds of
the folk songs
From the sighs of the
minaret…
From a cloud at sunset
woven by a chimney and by
the wound of the bricks of
the decorated and widespread
villages…
From the whispers of a star
settled in our east
From a story between
a rose and a...
