Nearly six months after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, a wave of exhibitions and events have been taking place in Damascus to pay tribute to the suffering and sacrifices that led to today’s Syria.
A new Syrian government led by Ahmed al-Sharaa was sworn in in March, almost four months after the Islamist rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham deposed Assad and ended 50 years of rule by his family.
The Revolutionary Banners of Kafranbel exhibition opened at the central Hijaz train station on Sunday, and will run until June 3rd.
Kafranbel, a town in the Idlib governorate, was branded the “conscience of the revolution” that led to Assad’s overthrow. Residents often shared messages on banners there, sometimes in English, drawing international attention to Syria through political commentary and occasionally humour, and references to current affairs and news developments elsewhere.
One of those involved in creating and preserving the banners was Maan Kkaydo (50), who said he lived, in effect, under siege from 2011 until December last year, trapped between Turkey and the Syrian regime.
Protecting the banners all this time was a collective effort, he said. “We were trying to protect them even though it was hard to protect our own children.”
Kkaydo said being able to exhibit the banners in Damascus was “incredible, indescribable. I lost hope and then I got it, [it is] a dream.” He said it was “difficult to reach internal society” before because they lived under decades of “dictators and oppression”.
His own father was a political detainee multiple times, he said, during which period everyone would avoid the family, not even say “happy Eid”, because they were frightened to be associated with them.
The opening came a week after hundreds of people turned up for the launch of another new exhibition, organised by the archival project Creative Memory of the Syrian Revolution, at the Damascus National Museum. It is being held to honour detainees and disappeared people, and will run until June 6th.
The exhibition includes sections on the infamous Sednaya Prison, chemical weapons attacks and the Caesar photographs, through which a military defector revealed evidence of mass torture and killings.
The exhibition was supported by the Syrian Ministry of Culture. Speaking about its opening, culture minister Mohammad Yassin Saleh said, according to local media: “We inaugurate this exhibition alongside the issuance of the presidential decree establishing the National Commission for the Missing.
“Culture can only be built upon truth, and dignity is safeguarded only by granting the disappeared their rightful recognition. Truth must not be hidden as its victims were hidden. Our responsibility today is to do everything in our power to uncover it.”
Yara Ghanem (23) took the opportunity to visit the museum for the first time in her life. She said the exhibition made her feel hope for the future but also pain, which it was impossible to process before because of the level of terror.
“My entire life in Syria, under the dictatorship, I haven’t had the chance to really think of the detainees ... So this is why I came here, because I believe that the least we can do is come here to learn more about them. Other people, they might not understand how hard it is, the fear that we were living under and just not being able to even educate ourselves on their cause.”
She said the experience “combines both pain and hope, seeing all these people finally being able to come and see ... the paintings that tell the stories of these detainees. It gives us both hope and allows us to feel the pain that we weren’t able to feel.”
She said she wanted the Syrian people to exist as one now, but added that they “should definitely keep criticising the government, not out of hate, but so we can build the country that we’ve been dreaming of”.
