Tuesday, March 19, 2024
Part 2: Tima Kurdi, author of ‘The Boy On The Beach’ (Simon & Schuster, 2018), speaks to Sarah Nachar and Susan Dirgham about: Women in Syria  COVID-19 and Sanctions on Syria  Syria - Our Good-Hearted Mother  Women In Syria Today Tima describes the dramatic changes that have taken place since she grew up in Syria, when women mainly stayed at home...
Published by Beloved Syria with the permission of the author. Lady Damascus was first published in SYRIA through writers’ eyes, edited by Marius Kociejowski (Eland Publishing Ltd, 2010). Brigid Keenan is a journalist and author. Her book Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City (Thames & Hudson, 2000) and the photographer Tim Beddow who helped her produce it are mentioned in Lady Damascus. See this...
 Tima Kurdi, author of ‘The Boy On The Beach’ (Simon & Schuster, 2018), was born and raised in Damascus.    In 1992, she immigrated to Canada but maintained close links with her family in Syria. There were joyful reunions back in Damascus, but in September 2015, a personal tragedy struck the Kurdi family. Tima’s younger brother Abdullah, his wife Rehanna, and their...
My memories of Bab Tuma, a predominately Christian quarter in old Damascus, go back to my first Christmas in Syria. Like locals, I was rugged up for the winter cold. There were street lights and decorations, and a towering Christmas tree! Father Christmas’s were handing out sweets and one was stopped on a corner, playing the saxophone.  If you search on...
By Rasha Milhem One lonely night recently, during a particularly hard time of the coronavirus quarantine, a high school friend and I reviewed our lives and recalled the 2000s with some nostalgia.  We are millennials, born in the early 1980s, when Israel invaded and occupied parts of Lebanon and conflict between the state and the Muslim Brotherhood Movement threatened to destabilise...
In Damascus last September on a journalist's visa, I had the opportunity to interview some truly impressive women in different fields of work. This impromtu chat in a school yard was the most spontaneous and delightful of interviews. The students were thrilled to meet a 'real' journalist and, as it happened, I was thrilled to show off the little bit...
This video message to Australian members of parliament (MPs) was recorded in Madam Janset Kazan's office, Damascus, 21 September 2019. Captions were added by Sarah Nachar, and Rana Alkhayrat and Rasha Milhem translated the interview with Madam Janset. In this country, we believe in all religions, so we took the concept of forgiveness and reconciliation from all the religions that...
  Beit Jabri is one of many remarkable family homes in the lanes of old Damascus that have opened their doors to the public: they may have become boutique hotels or more humble abodes for international students or backpackers. Others, like Beit Jabri, have become cafe-restaurants that offer the delights of the Damascene cuisine. Sitting at one of the tables in...
Article by Rasha Milhem 22 April 2020 Above image: Church in Daraa, empty of its congregation for the Orthodox Easter Sunday service because of COVID-19 restrictions. (Ref: SANA, Christian denominations in Syria that follow Eastern calendar celebrate Easter) Only international solidarity and cooperation among States can slow down and eventually defeat the common enemy Professor Dr Alfred de Zayas Syria’s Minister of Health, Nizar...
Posted by S. Dirgham, who accepts all responsibility for the technical glitches with the subtitles. Translation of video interview by Rasha Milhem and Sarah Nachar. This page is being posted on 17 April 2020 to celebrate Syria's 'Evacuation Day'. It is an especially significant day because April 2020 marks 100 years since the San Remo conference, a meeting of the prime...