ALEPPO BEFORE AND AFTER THE WAR 2010–2018

What remains of Cultural Heritage in Syria? And in particular in Aleppo? Aleppo, according to UNESCO, is the oldest city in the world. The first settlements date back to 12,000 years ago, the first evidence of the city to 8,000. The A. visited the city in October 2018 at the invitation of the Syrian Trust for Development. He previously went to Syria for a photographic tour in 2010. It was a unique opportunity to document some noticeable buildings and monuments, later on affected by the war. When the war began in 2012, the A. retrieved the photographs and gave them to his students, who then ran some 28 projects of Cultural Heritage items. They are small monuments or small projects, neither complete not very accurate, but sometimes they are unique for the monuments that have already disappeared. In 2017 the book Reviving Palmyra was published, whose main author is the Finnish archaeologist Minna Silver. The book shows the results of the surveys of some monuments of Palmyra, including the Roman theater, the temple of Bel, the triumphal arch and the funerary tower of Al-Habel. The A. made an exibition of the these projects in Ancona, Italy, and produced a video of the exibition, which was then published online. Reme Sackr saw the video and invited the A. to visit Syria. She is a Syrian woman of the Syrian Trust for Development, a Syrian NGO for reconstruction of Syria. She is responsible for the Living Heritage Program inside the Trust, in practice responsible for the reconstruction and the restoration of the monuments in Syria. So in October 2018 the A. went to Aleppo, Syria, for a second time. The present paper shows some results and comparisons for same monuments before and after the war. The objects of the survey are some parts of the Citadel walls, the entrance tower of the Citadel, the southern tower, one mosque and the minaret of the Citadel mosque. One of the first monuments to be restored will be the minaret of the Great Omoyyad Mosque in Aleppo. Some monuments, the minority, are apparently in good condition, seemingly untouched by the war. Some are badly damaged and unsafe. They must first be made sade and subsequently restored. Finally, other monuments – and these are the majority – no longer exist because they have been destroyed to their very foundations. It seems that the war, besides the population, has particularly targeted monuments, perhaps because they represent the soul and history of a people and a country. For them the problem arises whet