Growing up in South London, children’s book author Elizabeth Laird always hungered for stories. Although her family praised her for being a voracious reader, her parents monitored what she read, frowning on fairy tales or anything supernatural.
Despite this, Laird developed a passion for folktales that she would carry into her adult life, first as a teacher, working in countries all over the world, and then as an author, penning more than 100 books with works that have been translated into 20 languages.
Laird got the idea to start preserving folktales while visiting Ethiopia in 1996. While on Mount Entoto, overlooking the capital, Addis Ababa, she encountered an old man who “out of the blue” told her a fable about ants. “I suddenly realized there must be an enormous number of similar tales,” she recalls.
The next day she rushed to the offices of the British Council, an international organization that specializes in cultural and educational programs, to propose a project. Soon, she was traversing the country in search of stories. Ultimately, the story-collecting effort amassed more than 300 Ethiopian folktales, now available in an online archive in both Amharic and English.
In the years since, Laird has continued to track down stories from different corners of the world. Now, she has drawn on tales amassed over the years for her recent work, Folktales for a Better World, her seventh folktale collection.
AramcoWorld recently spoke with Laird about her latest book and her love of folktales.
How did you start collecting folktales?
I lived in Ethiopia for several years in the 1960s. I went back 30 years later and persuaded the Ethiopian Ministry of Education and the British Council to set up a project to collect stories from the 14 regions of Ethiopia [the Ethiopian Story Collecting Project]. Honestly, I cannot tell you how wonderful it was. For example, I’d be sitting there beside a tributary of the Nile with a storyteller—this was down in Gambela in Western Ethiopia—and he would tell me a story about the beginning of time when God created man. I had a marvelous time doing it. Then, in 2001, I wrote the stories in simplified English so that the Ethiopian children could use their own stories to learn English.
Did you have a favorite story growing up?
My family was very religious, so Bible stories were the beginning, really. I always loved the story of Joseph in which you’ve got these great characters. In the Bible you’ve got poetry, you’ve got laws, and you’ve got character studies like David. I mean it’s just the most marvelous stuff: the poetry, the end of the Book of Job.
How did you start writing folktale collections?
Once I started collecting them, the more I read, the more I realized the enormous similarities. There’s the story about the magic cow in Afghanistan, one of the most popular Afghan tales, which is pretty similar to the one in the Sudan border. These stories have been circulating around the Middle East and Africa since time began, and so I got terribly interested in the origins. I’ve always enjoyed the tales, but finding these echoes of stories across so many different cultures was so intriguing I kept looking for more.
When you were putting together Folktales, how did you choose which stories to include?
I wanted to find stories about reconciliation, peace and kindness. The aim was to find stories which had a winning message and to show that these cultures have these wonderful traditions of hospitality and forgiveness. I spent ages reading through my collection. The Afghan story “The Emir and the Angel” comes from renowned Afghan storyteller Amina Shah, the sister of the great man of letters, Idries Shah. The Palestinian tale “True Kindness” really spoke to me for this book. I just adore the Sudanese tale “Allah Karim” because it has the most beautiful reconciliation in the end.
What did you hope to accomplish with Folktales for a Better World?
I wanted to feature a series of stories originating in places like Ramallah and Gaza, Afghanistan and Syria, places I’d actually visited and places whose people are having a particularly hard time at the moment. In my grandson’s London classroom, you will find him next to a Syrian boy and an Afghan boy. There are refugee children in all our schools here. My dream for this book is that a teacher will read one of these stories aloud in class and a child from one of these countries will say, “That’s me. That’s mine.” These stories are intended to act as a reminder that these are beautiful, ancient and wonderful cultures of which they can be very proud.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
]]>This spring marks the seventh expedition that Zainab Bahrani, chair of Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology, has conducted in northern Iraq and southwestern Turkey since establishing the Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments project in 2012. Spurred by the damage and destruction war had wreaked on sites in the region, Bahrani set out to create a database that could serve current and future generations of conservators and scholars.
Using photography to preserve information is not new—archeologists have been doing this since the invention of the camera in the mid-1800s. How Bahrani photographs these sites, however, reflects a shift in thinking about artwork made from 4000 BCE to 200 CE in an area that spans present-day Iraq, eastern Syria and northwest Iran.
Scholars now believe that Mesopotamians did not simply regard art as portraying the world around them. To them, some art forms like statues and reliefs also actively participated in the world. In reviewing a compendium of new scholarship published in Critical Approaches to Ancient Near Eastern Art, professor Sarah J. Scott Wagner College in New York, highlights this perspective as “driven in part by the work of Zainab Bahrani.”
Bahrani describes herself as part of an ongoing process in academia that is “decentering Europe from histories of art and histories of archeology, where we were taught to look from only one perspective.”
For Frederick N. Bohrer, author of Orientalism and Visual Culture: Imagining Mesopotamia in Nineteenth-Century Europe and Photography and Archaeology, one of Bahrani’s important contributions lies in looking beyond her field of study. In documenting a site or object, for example, she records those features it acquired at different periods rather than, as is a common practice, focusing solely on its aspect at a particular time “as though it never had any other life.” She adopts a similarly unusual wide-angle approach in her analyses, he says, bringing in “aspects of cultural theory and developments in the humanities of the last few decades.”
Bohrer, who studies the way scholars in the West have historically described and interpreted the ancient Near East, regards Bahrani as a “remarkable, innovative scholar” who has changed the discourse about ancient art by raising new questions.
Bahrani, a native of Iraq, earned her master’s and doctorate in a joint program of ancient Near East and Greek art history and archaeology and, as a graduate student in the 1980s, some things she was learning didn’t sit right. A typical assignment was to discuss the ways Greco-Roman art was better or more advanced than the earlier Mesopotamian. “This assumption that there was a development where you go from more primitive to more sophisticated,” she says, “was something that I always questioned.”
The massive archive of cuneiform writings made it clear to her that ancient Mesopotamians had a highly sophisticated and complex “conception of reality and the relationship of representation to reality.” It was different from that of the later Greeks, whose civilization is regarded as the foundation of Western art and philosophy. As 19th-century Westerners studied Mesopotamia, they posited a historical progression with classical Greece at the pinnacle.
But to Bahrani, Greek and Mesopotamian thought were neither inferior nor superior to one another. They were alternative views, “which to me was so fascinating because it also became a reminder that what we sometimes consider to be natural and universal is just our own way of looking at the world,” she says.
This insight would come to bear while studying rock reliefs carved in the Zagros starting around 2090 BCE during the last Sumerian dynasty through the Assyrian and Babylonian eras to 300 BCE.
She first encountered them in textbooks where photographs of the Darband-i-Gawr relief, for example, show a man armed with an ax and a bow towering over two small figures sprawled at his feet. Here and in similar reliefs, the photographs are framed in such a way that they appear “almost as if they were paintings,” Bahrani says. This tallied with the traditional argument that they served as propaganda, an early version of billboards advertising a local hero. Seeing them in person, however, “it becomes clear that they’re not panel reliefs, they’re not architectural sculpture” that stands out against the mountainous backdrop.
Quite the opposite, they’re absorbed into the landscape, “very intentionally embedded into the structure of the rock formation, of the geological layers that you can see in the rock.”
Far from fully facing forward, the composition of Darband-i-Gawr follows the tilt of the rock, and the step the warrior is climbing is not carved; it is a layer of sediment that the artist has made part of the scene. In shots of the surroundings, we see this stratum running along the rest of the mountain. Significantly, other images—taken at various times of day, from different distances and angles, solo and as part of a high-resolution 360-degree panorama—underscore the relief’s remoteness and its minuteness in the landscape. As Bohrer points out, “Photographs don’t just capture what is in front of the lens. Every photograph captures a sensibility behind the lens.” Close-ups of the relief speak to Bahrani’s art-historian interest in stylistic analysis and iconographic details, while the ever-wider views reveal the weight she assigns to how the relief relates to its surroundings.
For comparison, Bahrani cites a famous Achaemenid relief on Mount Behistun in Iran. Sculpted in 521 BCE, it also portrays a 3-meter-tall King Darius facing a line of smaller figures of prisoners, hands tied behind their backs. Unlike Darband-i-Gawr, this scene is part of a 25-by-15-meter (82-by-49.2-foot) carving with 450 lines of inscription sitting some 200 meters (656 feet) up a rock overlooking a broad valley. “From below you can see that there’s something very high up,” she says. “Now, that is clearly on a major thoroughfare. But the ones that we’ve been recording are not like that. They’re in crevices and ravines and places that only maybe a shepherd or a goatherd might go.”
Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments images show that sculptors carved Darband-i-Gawr high above a narrow, rocky gorge known as Pagan’s Pass. The surrounding rock is uneven, marked by deep fissures, dark streaks and patches of hardy vegetation. Add to that the shifting play of shadows cast by myriad outcrops, and it is easy to see why Bahrani doubts they were intended as propaganda given how remote and difficult to spot they are. “Who is going to see them?”
This emphasis on context extends to documenting the ways ancient works have been subsequently incorporated into later structures. One such site is the Mosul Gate at Amedi (al-Amadiya), a 13th-century gate with Arabic inscriptions seamlessly integrated with a first-century BCE to second-century CE stone staircase and its three rock reliefs of life-size figures. Since 2019, Bahrani has used this documentation to direct a preservation project that pays equal attention to the site’s pre-Islamic and Islamic elements.
Over her career, she has disputed a number of preconceptions about Mesopotamia. In Women of Babylon: Gender and Representation in Mesopotamia, she pushed back against the perception of ancient women as subservient and lacking power. The 2022 exhibition She Who Wrote: Enheduanna and Women of Mesopotamia, ca. 3400–2000 B.C. at the Morgan Library and Museum in New York, built on those ideas. Among them was her observation that scholars had consistently downplayed the power of Enheduanna—the high priestess of Ur, a Sumerian city-state, around 2300 BCE—solely because of her gender. This included giving little credence to accounts that named her as the author of acclaimed poetic odes. Mining what Bahrani calls “a small idea more than 20 years ago,” some of her graduate students presented new research that bolstered her case (for a related article, see AramcoWorld March/April 2022).
She has also introduced new ways of looking at ancient warfare and violence (Rituals of War: The Body and Violence in Mesopotamia); challenged the treatment of text and image as wholly separate in Mesopotamia as they were historically in Europe; and questioned the term “visual arts” while studying Zagros Mountains reliefs. “It’s immediately tied to vision and viewing. But not all historical conceptions of the work of art are about viewing.”
Take foundation figurines. About 35 centimeters (13.8 inches) tall, they range from metal pegs topped with the sculpted head and torso of a god or royal to full-bodied statuettes. Created to be buried inside the foundation of buildings, they conferred protection and a powerful connection to the past and a collective memory. Just as these figures were not made to be seen, Bahrani argues, many of the Zagros Mountains rock reliefs were not made with viewers in mind.
Then why commission them? Bahrani believes it is crucial to consider the perspective of ancient Mesopotamians. “We tend to think that it’s common sense and patently obvious that an image is not the same thing as a person or a thing, that these are two totally different categories. But for them,” she says, “those categories blurred.” One’s image was seen as a detached part of one’s body, like hair or nails. This intimate relationship extended to one’s name, shadow and clothes. Carving images of local rulers into limestone, therefore, embedded them into the land where their presence conferred protection and reverence, Bahrani speculates, to nearby springs—a manifestation of Mesopotamians’ belief in the “agentive power” of art.
Her intellectual journey has depended greatly on reading scholars like Linda Nochlin and Partha Mitter, who questioned the veracity of what they had learned in their fields of art history. She vividly recalls diving into Mitter’s Much Maligned Monsters: A History of European Reactions to Indian Art and feeling thankful: “Reading those books gave me courage to pursue the directions that I wanted to pursue.”
Hoping to do the same for others, she included some of the history of archaeology and Western scholars’ attitudes in Art of Mesopotamia, a textbook she wrote in 2017. Professors of Mesopotamian art welcomed her book as a long-overdue update, an introductory overview that, one critic wrote, “skillfully fills this enormous void in the field.” Bohrer points out that, while it is unusual for scholars, particularly top scholars, to take time away from research to write a textbook, there is a lot of power in doing so “because it’s what brings people into a field in the first place,” he says. Through both text and illustrations, it shapes the way readers think about this ancient art. “That’s not just creating knowledge. That’s creating a field.”
Bahrani has been very outspoken on the need to ensure that this field includes people who call the lands of ancient Mesopotamia home. “One of the things that I find really unfortunate is the lack of translation of good textbooks into Arabic.” Having seen that students in Iraq rely on a 50-year-old text “full of racial theory,” she is carving out time to translate her textbook.
As for the Mapping Mesopotamian Monuments project, she continues to ensure that new material is simultaneously posted online in Arabic, Kurdish and Turkish as well as English. Bahrani hopes that younger generations will raise new questions—just as she has when standing below rock reliefs in the Zagros Mountains. Why such an inaccessible location? Why chiseled this way? Is there a pattern to the sites? Everything she knows about Mesopotamian thinking tells her that “nothing about this was random,” she says. “But because all the focus was on the power of the king, these questions were not being asked about ancient Mesopotamian art. So, I wanted to push to ask them.”
Named to signal the setting of an Islamic court, Dining With the Sultan is the first exhibition to consider Islamic art within the context of food, according to Linda Komaroff, the department head and curator of art of the Middle East at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. The show explores an aspect of or influence in Islamic food culture over time through nine thematic sections, organizing some 250 illustrated manuscripts, pieces of tableware and cookbooks from 30 public and private collections across the US, Europe and the Middle East. The items, mostly dated from the eighth to 19th centuries, focus primarily on Arab, Persian, Ottoman and Mughal empires.
Komaroff spoke about the coordination and intentionality invested in the exhibition that gives viewers a look into the preparation and serving of food.
Why was the appearance of the dishware important to the presentation of a meal?
It is an art form to prepare the food, but it’s more the interrelationship between food and art, except that the act of dining was in high enough esteem in Islamic lands, especially among the elite that you would have an absolutely fabulous table where that would be worthy of the food that goes with it … . [In a tent depicted in a 10th-century cookbook featured at the exhibition], it becomes clear that not only is the taste and the aroma important but how the food looks as well. Sometimes they might make [dishware] that’s all black or green or white, but the dishware has contrast—decorating [the food] with almonds and pistachios dyed red or yellow. … Wouldn’t it be fun if after you emptied your bowl, it looked the same as when it was full or it reminded you of what it looked like when it was full?
What purpose did cookbooks serve?
The cookbooks are not really for cooks there … . It’s the kind of thing that someone would have in his library, but it would not end up in his kitchen. The cookbooks come under the heading of adab, or etiquette, targeted to a male audience. The person reading it would be more concerned about the types of dinners he’s going to, to be able to recognize, “This is such-and-such dish, and the history of the dish is such-and-such.”
To be a chef, someone in your family was probably a chef and you became an apprentice … . It’s the kind of thing that’s passed on. The same with recipes and variants of recipes. The cook would be taught. They either memorize [the recipes] or they took notes. … What you can see here is we’re dealing with a highly literate and sophisticated culture.
Tell us about the importance of serving food correctly.
From the time of Akbar, the Mughal emperor who ruled in India in the 16th century, there’s an entire [description] on how food was served. Literally once the food is prepared, someone tastes it to make sure it tastes good. [If so], it’s put into Chinese porcelain or some other bowl with a cover on top of it, and it’s secured with a ribbon and then someone signs it like a certification. So that’s how you know. I always joke that I don’t think he ever got to eat a hot meal because by the time all of this is done, it’s possibly not hot anymore.
What from the exhibition has carried over to the present day?
People like to see how the rich and famous live … . Elite objects—that’s what survives. Exclusively things that were precious and costly and needed to be, or someone wanted to save them.
We dine on glazed ceramic tableware even today. … It’s a very clean and eventually economical way to produce tableware because they’re easy to wash. [Additionally], coffee-making traditions are still the same. … A lot of the foods are the same. Sometimes the ingredients change, but the recipes live over a very long period of time.
What do you want visitors to take away from this exhibition?
How fabulous Islamic art is … . I’d like to think with art … .It does open your mind if you allow it to, to thinking a different way, which is something that’s important to me. … Because I don’t think we are going to arrive at a better place in this world if people can’t move closer to another person’s viewpoint.
Abdessalem Zgaya stands on baked, cracking soil where water once trickled, looking over his fruit fields on the plain below Kesra, northern Tunisia. It’s the first time he has seen a spring dry up. “The summers just get hotter and hotter,” he says, adjusting his cap to block the sun. “I don’t know how much longer my lemon trees can survive.”
Amid the still, heavy air, Zgaya points out a row of young trees, starkly green against the brown-gold tones of the landscape. “The figs are different. See how their leaves are wilting? It helps the plants conserve water in the heat. When it gets cooler tonight, they’ll perk back up.”
Indeed, fig trees tolerate drought better than most, and as agriculture struggles in a warming world, that makes them ripe for study. For nearly four years, a Mediterranean research initiative, FIGGEN, has assessed how figs succeed while climate changes are causing other crops to fail. Though Zgaya isn’t part of the project, he, and other farmers in Tunisia, stand to benefit from FIGGEN’s findings.
The study, which concludes in 2024, involves DNA stress testing and analysis of a wide variety of figs in Tunisia, Turkey and Spain. Scientists have been working to identify specific genetic traits that enable the resilience of figs and their varieties that cope best with hot and dry conditions. When FIGGEN publishes the results Mediterranean farmers concerned for their future livelihoods may choose to grow the most promising types. Additionally, the study aims to plant a seed for preserving the biodiversity of increasingly arid ecosystems.
Back in 2006, in the ruins of a prehistoric village in the Jordan River Valley, a team of archeobotanists found proof that figs had been cultivated 11,400 years ago—long before the domestication of wheat, barley or legumes. As they outlined in the journal Science, this discovery could make the fruit trees the oldest-known agricultural crop.
The fig’s place in our history and culture is indeed deeply rooted. From its culinary use to its religious symbolism, as evoked in the Bible and the Qur’an, the fig has played a role in the birth of civilization. Believed to be indigenous to northern Asia Minor, figs have been cultivated around the Aegean and the Levant since ancient times. During the Greek and Roman empires, the popularity of figs spread, and their love of the well-draining soil of semi-arid climates made them an important crop, alongside olives, grapes and dates, farmed across the Mediterranean Basin by the first century CE.
Nowadays, agricultural conditions in the region are changing. According to a World Meteorological Organization report released at the end of last year, 2011-20 was the warmest decade on record. Land temperatures, it reports, have increased by 2 degrees Celsius since Industrial times—twice the global average—and the future bodes more frequent summer heatwaves and less rain. Such conditions also raise salt levels in dwindling groundwater, compounding the challenges plants face.
Fig trees, however, survive with minimal water, have little need for fertilizer and are resistant to many pests. They may burn in a forest fire but will grow back the following year. When a fig tree is cut down, a new shoot will generally spring from its stump. Wild figs may even grow on cliffs or in walls, where no soil can be seen and no water reach. Their formidable, fast-growing roots can tear rocks apart, finding water where other trees simply cannot.
That makes many of the 800 species of the Ficus genus, as per the Journal of Ethnobiology and Ethnomedicine, ecologically exceptional. Shade offered by their dense leaf canopies cools hot air and slows evaporation and the flow of rainwater over the ground, which limits erosion and retains soil moisture and organic matter.
Ficus fruits are a food source for more animal species than any other known fruit, a 2001 Cambridge University study showed. Animals disperse fig seeds (and those of other plants) widely, increasing the landscape’s biodiversity and rendering it more resistant to climatic uncertainties.
A few years ago, the sight from a train window of a fig tree growing robustly out of a cliff drove Riccardo Gucci, a professor of agrarian science at the University of Pisa in Italy, to investigate how any tree could thrive in such an environment. That thought eventually grew into FIGGEN.
To discover which varieties of Ficus carica (the common fig) cope best with climate change, FIGGEN teams gathered cuttings of a total of 270 different varieties. Some fig trees fruit once a year and others two or three times. Some have male and female flowers, others only female. Some trees need pollination, whereas others can produce fruit without it. In laboratory gardens, eight plants of each variety were grown in pots, and in late 2021 the testing of their resilience to a lack of water and increased salinity began.
The FIGGEN researchers have compiled a list of the 23 fig varieties that did best. A catalog will detail each project country’s most tolerant varieties, and their characteristics, including the fruits’ size, juiciness and perishability, and the tree’s resistance to disease. Catalogs will be distributed to dozens of farmers, nurseries and plant breeders, so that they may choose the most commercially viable and drought-resistant figs to work with in the future—potentially enabling agriculture across the Mediterranean to adapt to new conditions.
“Figs have the potential to be one of the most profitable crops in the Mediterranean today, especially in areas that are difficult for other crops,” says Tommaso Giordani, the coordinator of FIGGEN.
For the first time, FIGGEN’s work is identifying DNA sequences linked to the plants’ characteristic resilience to drought and salinity, among other qualities. “It is not our job to make future hybrids,” explains Giordani. “But by providing the first advanced genetic markers associated to these important traits, we will support fig breeders in their quest to create new varieties of fig even better adapted to climate change and help Mediterranean farmers to survive.”
According to World Bank records, Turkey is by far the biggest exporter of figs worldwide. Yet Tunisia is an important producer on the south side of the Mediterranean and, unlike Turkey, has never widely industrialized the process.
Tunisian varieties of Ficus carica, both wild and cultivated, are numerous. They vary from region to region, where they have adapted to local conditions and been selectively bred by villagers, who continue the age-old Mediterranean tradition of small-scale family farming. It was in Tunisia where FIGGEN researchers scoured the greatest range of regions and climates for fig varieties, rather than taking samples from national collections.
Ghada Baraket, of the University of Tunis El Manar’s Faculty of Science, holds a doctorate in fig genetics and heads up the FIGGEN project team in Tunisia. Thanks to the length and breadth of the country, and the contributions of farmers, cuttings of no less than 110 varieties were collected for FIGGEN’s drought-testing protocol. “We are all different thanks to our DNA, and our morphology is an expression of that. Figs are no different—what makes them resistant to drought conditions is coded in their DNA. We are trying to find that rather special resistance gene,” Baraket says.
Because there are hundreds of varieties of the common fig, they bear different names depending on where in the Mediterranean Basin they are grown. The names of Tunisian figs likewise vary by their region of origin; common ones include Bouhouli, Zidi and Magouli.
Figs from the Djebba region, in northwest Tunisia, are known for their exceptional quality because of the valley’s microclimate and local farmers’ ancestral growing methods.
Few of the terraced plots known as ejennas exceed one hectare, and figs grow alongside other fruit trees, vegetables and herbs in polyculture, a sustainable system that is based on traditional Berber farming. A network of tiny canals, established in the 17th century, provides water to hundreds of local farmers.
The hanging gardens of Djebba el Olia, perched on Mount Gorra, are a United Nations-recognized agricultural heritage system and serve as a food resource to the landowners. Djebba’s figs—mainly the Bouhouli variety—were the first fruit in Tunisia to receive an appellation d’origine contrôlée food-standards label, a recognition for their distinctive qualities.
FIGGEN participants Faouzi Djebbi and his wife, Latifa, are the proud owners of a 0.7-hectare plot in Djebba el Olia. Seven varieties of fig trees jostle with orange, pomegranate and quince trees; chickens snooze among the broad beans, onions and geraniums growing in the dappled shade.
“All my knowledge about figs, farming and growing food comes from my father, which came from my grandfather, which came from his father,” says Faouzi. Yet he says changing climate threatens timeless traditions here. Springs that flowed at 30 liters per second five years ago have slowed to half that, and some crops are disappearing.
Faouzi’s father used to grow tomatoes and parsley in the garden, but they don’t survive anymore. “Snow used to coat our garden every winter, soaking the soil and killing pests. But it only ever falls on the summit these days,” says Latifa, pointing up to the rocky peak of Mount Gorra.
A Ficus carica may be resilient to drought, but when watered regularly (farmers in Djebba water their trees up to 3,000 liters every fortnight), it becomes dependent and grows shallow, vulnerable roots.
Faouzi’s neighbor Anwer Djebbi (no relation) says his father’s garden is outside the catchment of Djebba el Olia’s springs and has limited access to water. But he says that is not necessarily a bad thing. “If you don’t give a fig much water, it will find it by itself, growing roots far down into the soil.”
A big drought a few years ago reinforced what the family knew: “My father’s figs may be smaller, but he didn’t lose a single tree—unlike many of the farmers growing figs around here.”
Kesra is the highest village in Tunisia, perched at an altitude of 1,150 meters. Looking out over breathtaking views from the café terrace, Zgaya points out his plantation on the plateau below. It is one of the largest fruit farms in the area. Alongside cherry, lemon, orange and walnut trees, Zgaya tends to 1,200 fig trees, the majority of the Zidi variety. “When my father was my age, only half the fig trees in Kesra were Zidis,” he says. “Nowadays Zidis have completely taken over.”
Many traditional varieties originating from the Kesra region produce abiadh (white) figs. Over the past 20 years, these older varieties have started to disappear. Until the 1960s, figs could not be transported far as they spoil quickly in the heat, so they were sold locally or kept for home consumption. Vehicles and new techniques to keep cargo cool opened the possibility of selling figs in distant cities where the biggest, darkest, juiciest offerings commanded the highest prices. Zidi figs are large, with a thick skin that keeps the fruit fresh for longer and, depending on their size, farmers can sell Zidis for three times the sum paid for other, smaller abiadh varieties.
There is a catch: To grow lots of fat figs, Zidi trees demand plentiful water. As the land becomes drier, farmers are realizing that reduced fig diversity may threaten their livelihoods. During recent droughts, Zgaya observed that his Zidis sacrificed their fruits to survive. Instead of producing 30 kilograms (60 pounds) of figs, a tree was giving perhaps only 7 kilograms (15.4 pounds) and the fruit was smaller. “However, I have noticed that the fruits of other varieties of fig are less affected by drought,” he says.
For example, “one day I tasted some delicious figs in the market that I didn’t recognize. I found out that they came from Medenine” in southeastern Tunisia, Zgaya says. His curiosity led him to take a few cuttings from a Bayoudhi fig tree that grew in a wall in that village.
Through his contacts, he was astonished to learn that his cuttings would need watering only once when put in the soil to root. While slower growing than local trees, they had resisted drought conditions well, and Zgaya was thrilled that they produced a large quantity of fruit and high quality: sweet and suitable for drying. He now plans to open a fig nursery and pioneer the propagation of this southern variety in Kesra.
Zgaya was lucky with his discovery. But as the growing season begins, fig farmers, breeders and observers around the Mediterranean will be able to benefit from FIGGEN’s catalogs.
The study identifying the most drought-tolerant fig varieties in Tunisia, Turkey and Spain will be available on its website and in scientific journals this year. FIGGEN’S vital work will help protect farmers’ livelihoods, benefit rural Mediterranean economies and preserve lands that might otherwise be lost to cultivation entirely in the face of a hotter and drier climate reality. Back in Kesra, Zgaya takes a fig leaf gently in his hand.
“Figs were here before us,” he says. “They belong not to us but to this land, and they will be here long after we are gone. There is no doubt about that.”
A lightning bolt pierces an oyster’s shell, leaving behind a luminous orb called a pearl. It is a source of light, and to possess a cluster of them is to be special—a luminary, even. Believing this to be true, the Byzantines used pearls in many artistic objects. In jewelry pearls conveyed wealth and status.
Although much remains unknown about this ancient pearl- and gem-encrusted bracelet before an Egyptian dealer sold it to J. P. Morgan in the 1910s, it hints at quite a lot about the vast Byzantine Empire from which it sprang.
The intricate design, particularly on the bezel’s reverse, suggests the work of a highly skilled goldsmith, who would have plied his trade in one of Byzantium’s urban jewelry centers: perhaps Alexandria, Egypt, or the imperial workshops of the capital, Constantinople, which served as a crossroads of commerce and culture. Hewing to the Roman esthetics of late antiquity—and the decree that gems remain exclusively for the emperor’s use or bestowal upon a worthy subject, such as a diplomat—the artisan likely created the showy bangle to adorn the wrist of a noblewoman. She would have worn it as one of a pair, the style of the day.
Because the bracelet survived in remarkable condition, the seller probably told Morgan the truth: It was hidden away for ages before being discovered as part of a hoard in Upper Egypt. Whatever its story, the bracelet, with its distinct materials, symbolizes the disparate narratives of the Byzantine Empire.
Special thanks to Michelle Al Ferzly, research associate at The Met.
]]>The delicate work, akin to an intricate tapestry, is by Helsinki, Finland-based Iraqi artist Adel Abidin, and it is the winner of the fifth edition of the Ithra Art Prize, the largest art grant in the Middle East and North Africa.
Titled Aan in Arabic script, the piece, which is 400 by 250 centimeters (13.3 by 8.3 feet), is made from the literal and figurative threads of selective memory to tell the tale of the fragility of history.
The work, which an independent jury selected from more than 10,000 submissions, explores the relationship among history, memory and identity. Abidin’s piece also investigates the at-once ethereal and powerful aspects of oral storytelling, particularly in the context of Arab history, which some historians have lamented often lacks documentation and is prone to conflicting interpretations.
Born in Baghdad in 1973, Abidin received his bachelor’s degree from the Academy of Fine Arts in Baghdad in 2000, the same year he left Iraq for Helsinki. Abidin has worked across various artistic mediums, including video, sound-based installations, sculpture and painting. His work is considered bold, edgy and thought-provoking, always made with strong links to his Iraqi homeland and search for identity. Through his work, Abidin, who has been the subject of major art exhibitions worldwide, probes politics, individual expression and mass-media manipulation. His work largely focuses on the differing viewpoints.
Abidin’s winning Ithra Art Prize commission now belongs to the center’s permanent art collection.
The prize was launched in 2017 by Ithra, one year prior to the opening of the center to the public in 2018. The Saudi Aramco-built creative center, like its name, which means “enrichment” in Arabic, focuses on culture, education, new technology and cross-cultural activities. Ithra Museum has five galleries, including one that is dedicated to contemporary Islamic art.
At first glance, viewers of Aan can hardly ascertain its portrayal of the ninth-century Zanj rebellion against the Abbasid caliphate in southern Iraq. The Abbasid was the second of the two great dynasties of the Muslim empire and overthrew the Umayyad caliphate in 750 CE, reigning as the Abbasid caliphate until it was destroyed by the Mongol invasion in 1258 CE.
In 869 CE, the Zanj, largely hailing from southeastern Africa and enslaved in Basra, Iraq, to drain the region’s salt marshes, rebelled against their masters and the caliphate to protest the austere conditions in which they lived.
“History is always told by the victors,” says Abidin. “I am very much interested in history and how history has been written. We never read what the victim has to say.”
In many respects, Aan is a way for Abidin to give voice to the victims of the Zanj rebellion, which continued for 15 years. The revolt grew to involve both slaves and freemen and claimed tens of thousands of lives before it was finally crushed.
“History remains alive and constant, but we often don’t know what is true or fiction,” Abidin says. “Many historical events keep repeating themselves. The Zanj rebellion is a revolution against social injustice like many present rebellions in our world today.”
The otherworldly abstract shapes in the mural are made from thin Japanese rice paper and layered with glue and have been made with the repeated stamp of the word “Aan.”
Abidin drew his inspiration from the Japanese philosophy of Ma, emphasizing negative space, often described as a pause in time, an interlude or emptiness in space.
“I returned to traditional techniques, adhering thin Japanese paper to the canvas with starch,” explains Abidin. “This process allowed me to construct layers of information within the negative space, forming a visual narrative and representation of the mythical landscape during the Zanj rebellion in Basra, commencing in 869 AD with the collaboration of the Aan stamps on the canvas.”
He further emphasizes how he aimed to create a work that revealed his own unique perspective on a historical event, recognizing, as he notes, how “much of history relies on oral storytelling.“
"I was interested in creating a work that gives the feeling of a tapestry of history, and the use of rice paper allowed me to accomplish this,” explains Abidin, adding how he would like to continue to learn the technique of working with Japanese rice paper.
The resulting image, laden with movement, reveals a surreal rendering of Basra as well as the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that appear to flow over the city, according to various interpretations that Abidin read of the rebellion. Each stamp presents a different and often contradictory version of the rebellion’s history—the act of its making thus professing the fallacies of historical documentation.
“If you press the stamp hard, it leaves a strong ink imprint, and if you press softly, it leaves only a soft trace,” explains Abidin.
The mural is based on one year of research into the Zanj rebellion and aims to capture the fragility of history and question the accuracy of recorded history, at the same time elevating the voices of overlooked groups or individuals and their own histories.
With Aan, Abidin creates a contemporary work of art that offers an alternative for preserving historical memory—even when the facts surrounding a current or historical event are questioned, as with the Zanj rebellion.
An artwork thus becomes a way of documenting and capturing a lost moment in time and, as Abidin has strived to do, remembering the voices of those who have been defeated and often forgotten.
“A work of art is also a way of storytelling,” explains Abidin. “I believe that art is like a method or a process that we do to argue situations, create arguments, puzzle each other with the aim to make a change.”
In his 2004 one-channel video and sound installation “Cold Interrogation,” the artist explores questions relating to the identity of Arabs, Muslims and Iraqi individuals living in Western societies. “Since I left Iraq in 2000, I have been dealing daily with different questions about my country of origin,” he said at the time.
In a more recent multimedia video work, 2022’s “Musical Manifest,” which was first shown in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Abidin probes the cultural differences he has faced since immigrating to Finland.
Working with themes of identity, power, fear, clichés and uncertainties and misunderstandings in language, the artist questions his identity as one that straddles the Eastern culture of his place of birth and his adopted European homeland during a time of great misunderstanding between the regions.
Music here becomes one of his principal mediums in which to explore the subtleties and innuendos of his two cultural realities.
The idea of revolts across history, giving voice to the victims and the fallibility of history will be explored once again in Abidin’s new show, “The Revolt,” this winter in Helsinki.
The show will be curated by Nat Muller and will reveal an entirely new body of work comprising video, sculptures and drawings.
“In many ways, this show once again draws on the ambiguity not only of history but structural feelings that artworks can convey,” Muller explains. “History is in and by itself something that we always must question—because whose history is it?”
Like the ever-evolving narrative of history itself, the swirling light-colored forms in Aan are meant to both mesmerize and perplex the viewer. As Abidin posits, if history is ambiguous and often shrouded in mystery, then perhaps a work of art holds the key to understanding it with a subjective form of truth, one that is as much based on the facts we know as the facts we have yet to prove and the voices we often have never heard.
Growing up in London, Rachel Beckles Willson was surrounded by Western classical music. Her mother, a children’s book author, played piano at home, and when she wasn’t playing, BBC’s Radio 3 filled the air with Mozart, Beethoven and Bach.
“I don’t think there was any moment in my life when I didn’t think I’d be working with music,” Beckles Willson recalls now.
Beckles Willson’s own skillful playing won her a place at the Royal Academy of Music studying piano performance, and she later became a concert pianist. By the time Beckles Willson obtained her doctorate from London’s King’s College in 2003, she chose to focus on academia, hoping to balance performance and research. But she let go of performing, as it didn’t seem possible to do both.
That is until she discovered the `ud (oud), the pear-shaped lute descendant found in the Middle East and North Africa.
Entranced as much by its sound as by its centuries of history, in 2010 Beckles Willson started playing `ud, building enough skill to start performing on the instrument. She also became curious about its origins.
In 2016 she won a fellowship to explore how the instrument has been used around the world. That research resulted in her latest book, The Oud: An Illustrated History, an engaging chronicle featuring a wide array of photos, drawings and illustrations.
Today Beckles Willson is a professor of intercultural performing arts at Codarts University of the Arts, in Rotterdam, and Leiden University in the Netherlands. She performs whenever she gets the chance.
AramcoWorld caught up with Beckles Willson to discuss her book, and her personal and scholarly exploration of one of the world’s most iconic musical instruments.
How did you first meet the `ud?
I was writing a book in 2006 about European musical missions in Palestine and met `ud player Nizar Rohana. He showed me his collection of historic `uds. Each one was different. Each had a unique sound and story. I was completely captivated. Whenever I returned to the region working on that book (published in 2013), I would meet with him.
A few years later, I was living in Berlin and had a circle of Syrian friends. Often, when we got together, someone would have an `ud, and everyone would start singing. When I moved back to London in 2010, I decided that I needed to have an `ud in my new home. So I bought one and started trying to play it.
What place does the `ud hold in Arab society?
I think the `ud has a particular symbolism for the Arab world. It’s an instrument that people in the Arab world are obsessed with. Many people absolutely love it. It’s very much connected, I believe, to identity and probably to male identity in the Arab world. It’s a treasured thing, it isn’t just an instrument.
How do you explain the origins of this symbolism?
It comes, in part, from its history. The `ud was played at the time of the great Arab civilizations, the caliphate when there were thousands of women, great choirs of women playing the `ud. It was a time of great plenty, of joy, at least in the courts, where we have the sources, and the `ud was there. I suspect it still carries a sense of this past greatness.
Then there’s the instrument’s physical beauty. Each `ud has the opportunity for wonderful decoration, even calligraphy in the rosette.
Was it challenging to learn to play it yourself?
It’s a very awkward thing for a woman to hold. For a small female like me, the standard Arab `ud is very large, making it extremely uncomfortable and difficult. I couldn’t get my arm around it. Then it’s very hard to hit the right string. You can’t see what you’re doing when the `ud is in the correct position, which is facing away from you. The `ud slips in your lap until you get the knack. So, there are all sorts of difficulties, in combination with the culture, that expects you to just “get on with” this marvelous instrument.
Your book is not so much an academic work as it is a personal guided tour through a rich woven tapestry of ideas, stories and themes. Why did you write it this way?
We know history isn’t a straight line. As the `ud moved through time, there were at least three parallel developments in different countries, which may or may not be connected. So how do you tell three or more stories happening at the same time? It becomes impossible. I approached it more topically with themes while following a broad chronology. The book is intended to engage people who pick it up, look at the pictures and read a chapter or two. They should get something out of it, even if they read just one chapter.
What do you hope readers will learn from your book?
A richer understanding of the instrument and the cultures around it, as well as its history. I hope readers will discover connections between spaces that are sometimes separated.
I also feel passionate about telling the stories of women `ud players, about recognizing that the `ud has a very deep history with women. Currently, it’s associated with men, but that is very recent. I was able to source and include several old photographs of women playing the `ud in the book.
As an `ud player yourself, you prefer to play older instruments. Why is that?
I think every `ud player has their preference. I’m very attached to two `uds, both extremely imperfect, both made by Armenians. One is a tiny `ud made by Ali Galip in 1920. The other one is a larger one made by Beirut-based craftsman Leon Istanbuli.
There’s something different in the way these two instruments sound, but it’s not obvious. Frequently there’s something less direct, a little more complex. The sound might not be technically as good as a modern instrument, but it just pulls me.
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for length and clarity.
]]>As we celebrate the 75th anniversary of AramcoWorld this year, we are looking back at some of the memorable and visual story spreads in the magazine. In the past, AramcoWorld has written about the cultural impact of a simple reed hut like those in the marshes of Iraq and built recently in Houston, Texas. That journey really began in 1964, with the publishing of Wilfred Thesiger’s book The Marsh Arabs. His travelogue connected the world to a culture and people few had known or experienced. AramcoWorld amplified that connection in the November/December 1966 issue with the story "In the Marshes of Iraq."
]]>Iraqi American Israa Mahdi had never seen a mudhif, an ancient reed hall indigenous to the marshes in the southern part of her homeland—until she helped build one on the Rice University campus in Houston, Texas, last summer.
“I never had an opportunity in Iraq to go visit the marshes,” said Mahdi, a Baghdad native who emigrated to the United States at age 19 in 2009.
She was among dozens of Arab and non-Arab volunteers who constructed the mudhif, a structure dating back 5,000 years to the time of the Sumerians and the dawn of the written word, that was the centerpiece of the Senan Shaibani Marsh Arabs Project, which opened to the public in September. Before it closed in December 2023, UNESCO inscribed the practice of building the mudhif on its Intangible Cultural Heritage List.
Despite putting down roots and building a family in Houston, Mahdi said she had found “something missing” from her life. The Marsh Arabs Project filled that gap and gave others new insights into her country.
“The mudhif project put the soul back into my life,” she said. “It’s a great feeling. It makes me proud of my country, proud of my Sumerian history, proud to be here.”
Built entirely from Phragmites reeds that grow in the marshes between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, the mudhif traditionally serves as a hall for senior male village members to consult with their leader, or sheikh, a place to celebrate holidays and hold wakes, and a guesthouse for visitors.
The project was led by two local organizations, Archaeology Now and the Arab-American Educational Foundation (AAEF), and backed by a number of community groups and businesses, including Aramco, publisher of AramcoWorld.
For many Iraqi Americans it offered their first look at part of their culture. It also gave other volunteers and visitors insights into an ancient society that has succeeded in sustaining itself but is threatened with extinction today.
“The mudhif is amazing,” said Melissa Carroll, a Houstonian who attended an open house with her husband, John Eikenburg, and their son in September. “It’s a living-history museum, a living artifact. It tells a story about maintaining a culture.”
Retired Houston real estate agent Leslie Cauffman was equally impressed. “It’s fascinating,” she said. “I wanted to see its architecture, how it was built. It’s really natural.”
At first glance, the ancient structure standing on a grassy lot next to a huge arts building looked like a mirage. But up close it was certainly real. The volunteers who built it during the city’s long, hot summer could vouch for that.
Opening day in the fall featured tours, samples of cuisine from the marshes and hosa (celebratory chanting and dancing). Some Iraqi Americans choked back tears as poet Muhannad Neamah, who hails from Baghdad and now lives in Houston, celebrated the structure at the opening and spoke longingly of the “home” that he and his compatriots had left.
The project also included visits to the mudhif by middle school students from Houston schools, a talk about the biodiversity of the marshes and a “Culinary Adventure” evening featuring dishes and drinks from the marshes.
Becky Lao, executive director of Archaeology Now, the Houston affiliate of the Archaeological Institute of America, said the idea for the project took root in 2021 when she learned about mudhifs from archaeologists in the United States and Britain and discovered that some Marsh Arabs live in Houston.
“It’s not often that you find a tradition that is 5,000 years old” with ties to the local community, Lao said. “Here we are, anchored in the nation’s most diverse city, and we work to tell the stories of the people who fill this space.”
The initiative quickly gained support from AAEF President Aziz Shaibani, a longtime Houston resident who became its lead donor. The project is named after his late son, Senan, who was “driven by his love for Iraqi culture,” he said.
More than 4,000 Iraqi Americans live in Houston, Archaeology Now said in a grant application for the project to the city. Of those, “six or seven” are Marsh Arabs, said Aqeel Alazraqi, a volunteer who grew up in Nasariyah on the western edge of the marshes and whose family owned a mudhif.
The city gave $10,000 for a Rice University film student to document the project. It will go into a Rice archive “to preserve knowledge of mudhif construction—currently only known to elders in Iraq—helping to preserve heritage, cultural identity and community cohesion,” according to the Mayor’s Office of Cultural Affairs.
The AAEF viewed the project as a way to ensure that “accurate information about Arabs, Arab civilization and religions of the Arab world is portrayed to children, students and adults—the public at large,” said Ruth Ann Skaff, AAEF secretary and a volunteer. “It’s been electrifying to see people from all sectors of Iraqi life work together on the mudhif project. It was a collective effort, a labor of love.”
Volunteer Azzam Alwash, an Iraqi American civil engineer who has worked to protect the marshes through his nongovernmental organization Nature Iraq, said something similar: “The Iraqi hands that built this mudhif are not Sunni, not Shi‘a, not Turkoman. They all came together to preserve a symbol of Iraq.”
Project organizers teamed up with Alwash early on to help bring the effort to fruition. He called the reed buildings examples of “sustainability before sustainability was a word.”
They are living examples of “Sumerian engineering, determined over eons of trial and error,” he said. “They knew how to live with their environment. … If we want to live in our environment as the world changes, we need to relearn our history because the blueprint for our future is rooted in our history.”
The reeds in the marshes grow up to 7.5 meters (24.6 feet) tall, and bundles of reeds make up the thick columns that form the mudhif’s arches. The bundles are aligned in facing pairs set in meter (3.28 feet)-deep holes that are slanted slightly outward. Then they are bent toward each other and bound together at the top, creating a pretensioned arch that gives the building stability—and a spacious, cathedral-like interior.
The ropes that bind the reeds into columns are made of crushed reeds, as are the mats that form the roof and sides of the mudhif. This latticelike work is done mainly by women.
A few families in the marshes ply the mudhif-construction trade. The lifespan of a mudhif is about 15 years.
Project organizers had to clear some daunting hurdles to keep the undertaking afloat, almost from its inception.
When they couldn’t locate a local builder or clear a path through government bureaucracies to harvest enough reeds as originally planned, Alwash came to the rescue.
“We’re going to do something that’s never been done before,” he said. The reeds would be gathered in Iraq and shipped to Houston, and a master builder would come from the marshes to guide construction.
Then, just after the paperwork for the builder to fly to Texas was completed, he decided he did not want to leave the marshes. Alwash volunteered to manage mudhif construction. Although he’d never built one himself, he had commissioned three in Iraq.
Next, the ship carrying the container of reeds from Iraq caught fire in the Suez Canal and its cargo had to be transferred to another vessel. That snag and other delays meant the start date for construction had to be pushed back.
Finally, when the container arrived in Houston, Customs agents tore apart its contents. The reeds had been packaged in components “like a box of Legos,” said Lao, but what arrived was “basically a container of sticks.”
Last June, despite heavy rains and scorching heat, the work got going. The task lasted about five weeks, or twice the time it takes skilled builders in the marshes. “We’re a bunch of amateurs,” Alwash said with a grin. But he still gave the project a “90 percent” grade.
British explorer and writer Wilfred Thesiger would immediately have recognized even the “90 percent” mudhif. “Kicking off my shoes, I passed between the pillars. Eight feet in girth, each pillar was formed by a bundle of giant reeds, the peeled stems bound so tightly together that the surface was smooth and polished…,” he wrote in The Marsh Arabs, a book about his time in the region in the 1950s.
“We considered the mudhif kind of a sacred place, a very special meeting place, not just a place for chitchatting,” said volunteer Alazraqi. For him it represents the center of the community and a symbol of the tribe. “If you have a problem you have to go to the mudhif to discuss it and the elders would make a decision,” he said.
The mudhif has no door; thus, it is never closed, and the entryway is low so that anyone coming in “must kneel … as a sign of respect to the mudhif.”
No one lives in a mudhif, but villagers in the marshes reside in smaller versions of the reed structure called surefas, Alazraqi noted.
The structure is built aligned with the prevailing winds, said Alwash. That helps keep the inside much cooler than outside, where the mercury can exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) in the summer.
The mudhif and the culture it represents are severely threatened.
The project screened the 2011 BBC film Miracle in the Marshes of Iraq, which focused on the work led by Nature Iraq to revive the wetlands after Saddam Hussein’s campaign to drain them—to deny rebels a place to hide after the Gulf War—in the early 1990s. He built dikes that shut off water from annual spring floods that replenish the marshes.
That dried up 90 percent of the 20,000 square kilometers (12,400 square miles) of marshes, turning them into deserts of cracked mud. Close to 200,000 people were displaced, according to a Human Rights Watch report in 2003.
The marshes partially recovered after Saddam’s ouster in 2003 when, along with Iraq Now, the United Nation’s Food and Agricultural Organization and several countries launched projects to revive them.
According to the UN, by 2005 the marshes had been returned to some 40 percent of their total original size in three locations that have been made national parks and regained some of their population. The overall marsh region was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2016.
Work to protect the marshes continues, but it’s dangerous. Nature Iraq’s project manager was kidnapped early last year. He was released after two weeks and had undergone torture. Alwash last visited the marshes early in 2023 but considers it too dangerous now to return.
The drought and upriver dams are still endangering the marshes. Lao fears they “might disappear” soon.
Alwash was more upbeat but stoic: “There is hope. There are solutions [for protecting the marshes] when the political will is available. My fear is that the culture that took thousands of years to develop around the marshes is disappearing.”
He told the volunteers that they can keep an ancient heritage alive.
“What makes this project important is spreading knowledge, but more important is the preservation of what it takes to build a mudhif,” he said. “Everybody who participated in that work has the knowledge. We preserved it. You are now the custodians of this knowledge, and it’s your job to pass it to the next generation to keep it alive.”
With no family members at his side, once he made it to southern Italy, he embarked on a journey to the United Kingdom that took several months.
He found a way to reach Milan. Soon he took off again, hidden in a lorry, heading toward France. When the driver discovered him, he ended up in a refugee camp near Calais.
Three months later, Bledar entered the UK clinging to the undercarriage of an 18-wheeler. He was injured—his jacket briefly caught when he dropped himself from the moving vehicle—but he’d made it.
At the time, in 1999, Albania’s economy had been in free fall for nearly a decade and its citizens could not travel to the European Union without proper paperwork. For Bledar, this was the only way to pursue a better future.
His older brother, Nikolin Kola, who had already joined thousands of their countrymen living abroad, was waiting in London.
Bledar found a job washing pots in a restaurant near London. Soon he stepped up to making sandwiches, salads, pommes frites and anything else the chefs assigned him. “I rushed through the dishes to do this part that wasn’t my work,” he said.
Two of the chefs encouraged him, and he managed to obtain some culinary training. Over the next decade, he worked his way up, scoring positions at some of London’s most celebrated restaurants, including Le Gavroche, a famed French restaurant, the first in the UK to earn three Michelin stars. He even did two stints as a stagiaire (an intern) at Noma, the Copenhagen restaurant that World’s 50 Best Restaurants’ annual list has dubbed the best in the world five times.
Seventeen years later, in 2016, Bledar returned to Albania with a clear objective. He was going to open one of the country’s first gourmet restaurants, Mullixhiu (“the mill” in Albanian, so named because Bledar mills his own wheat).
Working with his brother, Nikolin, who’d moved back to the capital, Tirana, in 2015, Bledar intended to draw on the Eastern European country’s 500-plus years of culinary heritage to reinterpret traditional dishes. Yet, with few recipe books available to guide him, that proved to be challenging. Although he knew his homeland had a long culinary history, Bledar kept coming up empty, a situation chefs and culinary aficionados across Albania discovered in the early 2010s, according to Nutritional and Health Aspects of Food in the Balkans.
Albania’s loss of culinary traditions partially happened because of nearly half a century of communist rule. With government restrictions on consumption of dairy, meat and fat, Albanians often found themselves unable to replicate the dishes that had been passed down through generations, as Albanian American food writer Rose Dosti noted in a 1999 review of one of the first Albanian cookbooks produced in decades.
With shorelines stretching along the Adriatic and Ionian seas of the Mediterranean and the Albanian Alps (Bjeshkët e Nemuna, or Accursed Mountains) sweeping across its inland terrain, Albania boasts 2.8 million citizens, as per government statistics. They live in a region that has been the crossroads of empires for a millennium.
Albanian cuisine’s Mediterranean roots reach all the way back to the Illyrians, the Iron Age society from whom Albanians are believed to descend, according to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Greece and Rome. These tribes herded sheep and became renowned for olive and grape cultivation, still a point of pride today.
Albania’s natural harbors and position on the western Balkan Peninsula offered the shortest overland route to modern-day Istanbul, making it very attractive to foreign powers. Over the centuries, everyone from the Greeks to the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires dominated the region in turn, with each culture toting in ingredients, utensils and recipes that Albanians adopted, according to culinary anthropologist Arsim Canolli, a professor at the University of Prishtina in Kosovo.
The Ottoman Turks had an enormous impact. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, after conquering Albania in the 15th century, the Ottomans ruled for five centuries. They brought a new culture and faith, Islam, which remains a dominant religion in the country. The Ottomans also left their mark on Albanian cuisine. The empire brought Albanians iterations of dishes like shish kebab, moussaka and liberal use of phyllo dough in various recipes, as noted by journalist Nada Dosti.
Canolli suggested that the influences went both ways. “There is an Istanbul-centric image of Albanian cuisine, as if all [that] Albanians were eating during Ottoman rule were meals cooked by the sultan’s chefs,” he said. “The reality was quite the contrary. Culinary historians argue that Ottoman and current Turkish dishes were actually influenced by Balkan nations.”
Albanians, like other Ottoman-ruled populations, migrated across the empire, he said, bringing their own food practices with them. In addition, Albanians served in high-ranking positions under the Ottomans, importing Albanian food traditions to Istanbul and other major cities of the time, Canolli explained. “It’s right there if you look for it,” he said. “You have Albanian dish names in Turkey today such as Arnavut ciğeri (the name for this spicy fried lamb or veal dish translates to “Albanian liver” in Turkish) and Elbasan tava (known as Tavë kosi in Albania, in Turkish the casserole of roux, yogurt, eggs, lamb and rice is named for the central Albanian town, Elbasan). There was also periphery-center influence.”
Albania remained under Ottoman control until the early 20th century. After independence in 1912, new ideas flowed in, particularly from neighboring Italy.
Separated by just 45 miles across the Strait of Otranto at its narrowest point, Albania and Italy both enjoyed diets that drew heavily on olives, tomato-based sauce (believed to have become part of Italian cuisine in the late 17th century) and pasta in the form of pastice (a baked pasta with feta cheese). The Arbëreshë, Albanian Italians who left for Italy beginning in the 15th century, are also believed to have brought back jufka (an egg-based pasta similar to tagliatelle) and other dishes over time.
However, these new, post-Ottoman influences failed to fundamentally alter how Albanians cooked, according to Canolli. They were simply folded into the food culture that Albanians practiced in their own homes, where foodways were perpetuated and handed down, according to Nutritional and Health Aspects of Food in the Balkans.
The rise of a communist regime in Albania in 1946 marked an abrupt shift in how Albanians ate. In its efforts to make the country self-sufficient, the communist Albanian government canned, rationed and collectivized food, according to a 2001 United Nations Economic Commission for Europe report.
Dosti pointed out that cookbooks became scarce and recipes were lost, and suddenly many Albanians did not have access to the ingredients that shaped regional variations and individual interpretations of recipes. Over more than four decades, food shortages became widespread.
A 1997 NATO report indicated that the fall of communism in 1991 resulted in a surge in unemployment and subsequent emigration. Over the following decade, more than 600,000 Albanians left the country in search of work, according to the Albanian national statistics agency. “We didn’t have any farmers,” Nikolin said. “It was chaos.”
In the following years, Albanians seemed more interested in finally having access to Italian, French or Nordic cuisine, and the drive to revive their own lost traditions was low, according to Rexhep Uka, who served as Albania’s Minister of Agriculture in the early 1990s. Foreign food was deemed richer, newer and more exotic than Albanian recipes. “Albanians have a bit of an inferiority complex,” Uka said. “We always think foods from other countries are better.”
Both during and after communism, the country’s timeless cuisine was scorned, Nikolin said.
When Bledar started to move ahead with his plan to open a restaurant upon his return to Tirana, he struggled to learn more about Albanian foods.
Neither he nor Nikolin knew much. By the time Bledar and his brother were growing up in the plains of the Zadrima region in northwestern Albania in the 1980s, local foods bore little resemblance to the more ingredient-rich iterations previous generations had known, Bledar said. Families received wheat bread for three months per year and cornbread for the remaining nine. Because of its scarcity, wheat bread was precious. “We would save anything we didn’t eat, whether it was slices or crumbs,” Nikolin said. “Even old, stale bread was a commodity.”
Some Albanians even credit these bread rations as the inspiration for papare (“unseen”), a dish in which stale hunks of bread are soaked in milk, then fried with gjize, a salted curd cheese, Nikolin said.
Unable to make progress on their own, the Kola brothers began asking around. They needed a gjyshja, an Albanian grandmother, friends suggested, an older person who had the opportunity to learn about Albanian dishes as they’d been served during five centuries of Ottoman rule.
Soon Bledar found his gjyshja, Monda Kalenja. She was a daughter of a military cook, and she’d had access to foods and recipes not available to others during the communist regime. In the kitchen at her side, Beldar began crafting pastas and stews and a plethora of other dishes.
But that was just the beginning. While Bledar worked to learn his own country’s classic plates, Nikolin started finding other recipes, ingredients and cooking techniques that might help his brother glean a better understanding of Albanian food.
“How can our food survive if nobody knows how to actually make it?” Nikolin said.
Bledar opened Mullixhiu shortly after he connected with Kalenja. His interpretations of Albanian food have proved to be a hit, garnering his restaurant mentions in reputable publications and a recommendation by World’s 50 Best Restaurants list of new discoveries as the place to go in Albania’s capital. Kalenja is quick to own her influence on the famed chef. “I have been teaching Bledar for years,” Kalenja says. “The only thing I never taught him was [layered pancake-like dish] flija!”
Bledar’s efforts inspired Nikolin. Although he’d spent more than 20 years working in IT, increasingly he devoted weeks at a time to making trips around the country hunting for information about pre-communism Albanian cuisine.
In 2018, the two brothers started a nonprofit, RRNO, aimed at defining Albania’s cultural food heritage. That same year the nonprofit held an event in Tirana’s pazari (market district) with 12 gjyshet (grandmothers) and 12 chefs, Nikolin said. Within months the event had inspired a television show called 12 Chefs, which ran on Albanian television for two seasons.
“We gave chefs awareness to go back and revisit Albanian cuisine,” Bledar said. “A year later there were five morning TV shows that involved cooking with grandmothers.”
Later in 2018 the two brothers partnered with the Albanian Chef Academy to set up a traditional-food-inspired cooking program. Launched in 2019, they offered students there and at the Instituti Kulinar Royal an extra training module.
The bulk of both schools’ programs is devoted to establishing standard culinary skills needed to work in a restaurant, but for two weeks Bledar arranged to teach each class his approach to traditional food. He also brought in gjyshet to teach students to roll jufka, the ribbonlike pasta of fresh eggs, milk and durum wheat that is dried in the sun.
The school doesn’t lack students. Paula Bardhi is typical of many recent graduates. Like roughly 60% of the culinary institute’s students, she hails from a rural area, in her case Pogradec on the shores of Lake Ohrid near the North Macedonian border.
Bardhi decided to go to culinary school because she was almost certain she would be able to get a job. Bardhi likes Albanian food—her favorite dish is pispili, a crispy cornbread mashed with leeks and goat cheese.
However, most restaurants in Tirana hire culinary school graduates like Bardhi as pizza chefs, sushi rollers and chefs de cuisine (kitchen managers).
Last year at Mullixhiu, Bardhi cooked a variety of recipes Bledar created for his restaurant. He said it’s hard to pick a favorite from his menu, though customers have regularly praised the rosnica. It is a saffron-laced chicken and fried-dough creation inspired by the dish that originated in Përmet, a small town in southern Albania nicknamed the “City of Roses.”
The plates included tave krapi, a baked carp casserole reinvented with sliced radishes for scales, followed by dromsa, a lime-green porridge consisting of clumps of durum and whole wheat seeds that zings with a sour freshness.
Bardhi also worked at Artizani, the bakery Nikolin opened in 2020, learning to make lakror, a meat pie that is an Albanian staple, from two older cooks. This pastry is made of multiple layers of phyllo dough with ground lamb, onions and leeks. Each sheet of dough is oiled and laid according to a specific pattern, according to Kadenja. Due to the complexity, families often make it together, telling each other stories as they add layers to the dish.
Nowadays, Nikolin continues to take regular trips across the country looking for forgotten recipes, ingredients and even grains. He pays farmers to cultivate a particular native corn variety he recently discovered so that he can make boza, a drink of fermented corn meal, to serve at his bakery.
Nikolin says their nonprofit organization plans to develop an app to inform chefs what indigenous ingredients are in season, which farmers to buy from and ways to use each ingredient. “The app will help give young chefs a reference point about Albanian cuisine,” he said. “We don’t want chefs just throwing things together. We’re trying to create a framework for our food.”
More than 20 years after he set out to build a better life in another country, Bledar is grateful that his journey led him back to both his native land and his native food, he said. “At the time, I had no idea or emotion about it,” Bledar recalled. He never imagined anything like this.
He and his brother intend to continue their quest. They have a plan, Bledar noted. Their impact on reviving traditional Albanian cuisine is yet to be seen.
In Arthur Clark’s first interaction with AramcoWorld in 1958, he immediately noticed its difference from the staid informational pamphlets he and his classmates received.
During a lesson on business-letter writing in elementary school, he'd penned a simple missive to its publisher, Aramco, hoping for a bit of intellectual stimulation.
“I was a third grader growing up in a little town in Iowa, and it was an opportunity to learn about people and places that I didn’t know about and receive colorful publications, which were interesting to the eye.”
Along with the magazine, Aramco sent a note saying that educators could receive free copies of each issue. Clark's mother was a teacher in a nearby town and he enrolled her so that they both could read AramcoWorld. That began what would become a decades-long love affair fueled by unquenchable curiosity, during which the magazine delivered, bringing exotic locales to life through vibrant pictorials and fascinating stories.
Nearly 10 years into its journey at that point, AramcoWorld had already blossomed from a practical intra-company newsletter into a full-blown magazine focused on external audiences. What started as an exercise in cross-cultural understanding between employees in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and the original headquarters of Aramco in New York had extended its mission to the world, building bridges through the sharing of knowledge.
As it celebrates its 75th anniversary this year, the magazine remains intent on continuing this legacy of drawing in writers, editors, artists and photographers passionate about the power of sincere storytelling to challenge stereotypes, open minds and alter perceptions.
This is the first in a series of articles celebrating this history—how in 1949, a company’s willingness to honor partners in the newly tapped oil fields of Saudi Arabia spurred a continuous effort to broaden the lens on a region (and religious heritage) often neglected or misrepresented in modern media.
For a young Clark, the magazine was an awakening.
“AramcoWorld was especially fun because it had more than just pictures and stories about products—it had stories about culture and economy and history, all kinds of things that were exciting and new.”
Alma Kombargi, who has held various roles in public affairs at Aramco Services Company for 17 years, had a front-row seat to the development of the magazine after its headquarters made a gradual odyssey. It hopped to various Aramco offices, first in Dhahran and then to Beirut, Lebanon, in the mid-1960s, to the Hague in 1975 and finally to Houston in the 1980s, where Alma landed and where the magazine remains headquartered today.
Her father, longtime Aramco public affairs executive Shafiq Kombargi, played a key role in ensuring that the magazine didn’t veer solely into self-promotion, working with strong editors like Rob Arndt to champion its cultural mission to balance out what he saw as unbalanced coverage of the Arab world.
A pet peeve of Shafiq’s was what he called the “TV Arab,” a caricature he saw as all too common in media and books, especially as relations with the West frayed during the oil embargo of the 1970s.
“He was trying to counter all that by showing the whole world the history, depth of language and the arts of the region,” says Alma. “He was very much an Arabist Palestinian and knew a lot about the whole region—there was so little information or magazines about the Arab world. That was a big tool that he used for public affairs.”
Alma is among the four out of five siblings who followed their father into working for the company, perhaps out of deep-seated loyalty, she said: Aramco flew the family to the United States after their father received a death threat during the Lebanese Civil War.
Helping oversee the magazine honors his legacy and makes sense of her immigrant experience, she says.
“Being Arab American—it was very therapeutic to be able to tell our story, especially because of the way we left,” Alma says.
That someone like Clark, meanwhile, would go on to become an assistant editor for the magazine is perhaps not surprising. As the son of a local news editor and graduate of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, he most likely would have found a career with an international outreach.
His passion for the Middle East and the Islamic world was not a given; rather he says the publication helped foster it.
After college, Clark joined the US Peace Corps in Morocco, then went to Egypt for a newspaper job and began writing columns for his hometown paper interpreting life in that part of the world for readers who grew up just like him.
Over the years, Clark says, he both adopted and shaped the unwritten formula of an AramcoWorld story as he tackled topics like how Middle Eastern archaeology influenced Agatha Christie or how a Saudi astronaut was changing the face of space exploration.
These stories, as he learned from longtime editors like Rob Arndt and writers like Paul Lunde, had to “breathe,” pulsing with life and energy and imbued with empathy.
“The beauty of the magazine is the broadness of its scope; there are so many subjects out there that represent the Arab and the Muslim worlds in interesting and exciting ways, and each of those areas is a wonder to explore,” Clark says.
Piney Kesting has experienced this for more than 30 years, during which she estimates she has averaged a little more than one freelance piece a year for AramcoWorld, starting with a 1989 feature on Saudi Arabia: Yesterday and Today, an exhibition about economy and society she followed as it toured cities across the US.
“I saw how interested people were in all the cultural aspect of Saudi Arabia, which to them was linked to oil in their minds,” she says, remembering how the inclusion of female artists opened the eyes of Americans. “It sort of plucked away at the misperceptions they had about Saudi culture.”
Like Clark, she sees the magazine as a teaching tool and enjoys highlighting human achievement and inspiring readers to be a little more engaged and culturally empathetic by foregrounding their commonalities instead of differences.
A few examples of many, she says, are her profile of California-born calligrapher Mohamed Zakariya and a look at a transformative literacy program started by molecular biologist Rana Dajani in Amman, Jordan.
“I love that you can pick the magazine up and disappear into other worlds and step back into your world and it has changed,” she says.
She has also traveled extensively for the magazine, first for a story on the last surviving Cold War sister-city relationship between Seattle and Tashkent, Uzbekistan. The piece transformed her thinking on Central Asia and showed demand for a broader international lens (she later returned to examine art in Tashkent’s metro stations).
AramcoWorld’s “eager audience,” she says, generates more feedback than anything else she has produced.
“I get emails from Africa, Europe and the Middle East from people who will write long thank-yous—‘Wow, I never knew about this, and I’m so interested.’”
For the magazine’s global shift, Kesting credits Richard Doughty, who joined via a similar path to Clark, intersecting with the latter at Aramco for many years. A photojournalist who supported himself in graduate school by teaching and writing, Doughty positioned himself as a dual threat who could win jobs by keeping publications from having to shell out travel expenses for two people.
In 1989 Doughty landed a photography internship at Cairo Today magazine, but before he left for his first Middle Eastern adventure, fellow photographer and “Aramco brat” Wendy Levine told him he should check out the magazine. He grabbed his first gig, photographing and writing a story on a French road rally that traversed Egypt.
As he continued to travel to the Middle East and prepare a thesis on how magazines covered conflict in Palestine, Doughty noticed a tendency, both within himself and other photographers and publishers, to “exoticize” or “other-ize” Arabs.
“They’ll wait until the modern-dressed person was out of the frame, and then they’ll take a pic of the old man in the robe smoking shisha because it looks like ‘old Egypt,’” he says.
Locals, he says, knew instinctively what journalists were doing, and they resented the way narratives were being shaped. The realization spurred a book project in Gaza where Doughty and his collaborators recorded and relayed subjects’ own descriptions of his photographs.
AramcoWorld, he would find out, shared an interest in providing context at this level.
“I saw AramcoWorld as the place where the Arab world and Muslim cultures were a priori part of an us and not a them, and I liked that very, very much,” he says.
Doughty joined the team as assistant editor in 1994, and went on to become editor in 2014, continuing to inculcate inclusion as the publication’s geographic scope, subject matter and readership began reaching even further into the Islamic world beyond the Middle East, from Bangladesh to Indonesia, as well as highlighting stories of migrants bringing their Arab or Islamic culture to third countries.
In the years since the publication marked its golden jubilee in 1998, world events have conspired to bring even more urgency to the task of understanding the Middle East and the Islamic world, yet a deficit remains.
Julie Weiss, a longtime consultant for AramcoWorld’s outreach to classrooms, noticed misconceptions about the Middle East and North Africa and a dire need to interpret the region for a larger audience.
“People were just hungry for information—they knew the bare-bones outline of stuff that you might get from the newspapers, but they didn’t know anything else,” says Weiss, who has switched careers but still works on what’s now called the Learning Center 20 years after she was contracted by Doughty.
The Learning Center transforms the magazine’s reportage into classroom lessons. With an apolitical bent, AramcoWorld articles provided updated yet timeless stories, presenting themes of migration, trade, history and economics that could be adapted to convey specific skills, Weiss said. It also had aesthetic allure.
“What took me was the photography, the visuals,” she says.
Evidence of Doughty’s fingerprints on the project, each lesson in the Learning Center still beckons readers to practice seeing things differently, peering into a photo to understand the decisions behind its composition.
“We pick a photograph and walk through students analyzing the photograph,” Weiss explains. “Why is it framed the way it is? What effect does it have on you as a viewer?”
It all stems from a sense of cultural accountability, both subjects and readers, Doughty says.
“AramcoWorld helps its readers widen their circle of inclusion,” says Doughty, who retired from the helm in 2023. “To me, the widening of our circles of inclusion is a profound spiritual task that is at the core of what it means to be a social human being.”
Doughty says it’s clear that support from the company, first from the American-founded Aramco and later from its successor, Saudi Aramco, has given space for a deeper examination of cultural topics.
That’s part of the allure for Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi, a writer, art collector and commentator based in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
“You have a higher quality of writing, and in many cases, the pieces cut through different disciplines,” says Al-Qassemi, whose dream came true in 2018 when he was profiled as “The Modernist” in the magazine after 25 years as a reader. “You might read an article about art that also mentions architecture, tourism and archaeology—cross-disciplinary pieces that you don’t see in other publications.”
In a part of the world where neglect has led to the closure of daily newspapers and art is often a casualty of war, AramcoWorld’s seven-decade archive is an invaluable resource for researchers and groups like Al-Qassemi’s Barjeel Art Foundation, which protects, restores, exhibits and promotes works from throughout the Middle East.
Al-Qassemi has personal proof from working on his book Building Sharjah. Uncovering a brief reference to Gordon Ivory, a British architect active in Lebanon and around the Gulf in the 1960s, kept him from “a wild goose chase” and helped him attribute three to four new buildings to which he could find no other extant reference. That the article was still relevant was fitting for the publication, he says.
“If you pick up a copy of AramcoWorld, you can easily come across an article about Ottoman Cairo, Syria, civilizations from a few hundred years ago or read about contemporary art. What I like about AramcoWorld is that there aren’t timelines. You can read it in a year or two or three, and it is like a time capsule.”
Barnaby Rogerson, who runs the small travel imprint Eland Publishing in London, says it’s refreshing that AramcoWorld can show such “fearless enthusiasm” for the Arab and Muslim worlds while examining impactful legacies of Western travelers and the educational institutions founded by foreign powers.
AramcoWorld, he says, is “up with the angels” when it comes to centering local voices globally.
Rogerson first encountered the magazine many years ago at a since demolished British consulate in Tunisia.
“The consulate had a library on the ground floor much used by students, and there, much to my delight, I came across an article on the great historian Ibn Khaldoun,” Rogerson says.
Since then, he has been a reader and frequent contributor, to the point where he wanted to meet up with an AramcoWorld team member in London.
With the magazine headquartered in Houston, he expected to rendezvous with a loud and proud Texan. Instead, Clark showed up.
“It was a surprise that when I met my first AramcoWorld staff member for a coffee at a street café near the British Museum, that Arthur was a thin, book-loving, scholarlike sage,” Rogerson recalls.
Ever since the third grade, AramcoWorld has fed Clark’s curiosity in the easy, entertaining way that he would dare say nourishes all its readers. “It’s educating people without telling them that you are educating them.”
Making positive connections has been the mission of AramcoWorld since its first edition 75 years ago. In the words of former Aramco President Bill Moore in Volume I, No. 1: “We hope this publication will enable us to get better acquainted with ourselves.” While early editions contained much community and company news for employees, from its first decade, AramcoWorld also published stories of cultural interest—seeking out the histories, achievements and ideas from around the globe that remind us we are all truly connected. As this calendar shows, AramcoWorld’s editors have always understood the importance of showcasing connections through photography. These dynamic images of people engaging with food, music, art, history, science and more, bring our readers closer to people and places near and far.
Our 75th anniversary marks a celebration of these connections—and the stories yet to be told. We hope to have sparked your curiosity over the years, ultimately to make the world feel a bit smaller. Connections. Stories. Cultures. That’s been our focus for 75 years. And that’s exactly how we will continue to build our legacy.
We hope you have a blessed 2024.
—AramcoWorld Editorial Staff
In this calendar, the caption for each month’s image includes the AramcoWorld story headline and edition in which it was published. The photos highlight the commitment of the company and its photographers to show positive interconnections among people from various cultures. AramcoWorld continues that tradition 75 years later.
“When I sing with my soul and it goes well, I tear up,” Shehu says.
More than 1,200 artists and thousands of folk-music lovers travel across the globe to attend the 2023 National Folklore Festival, an eight-day celebration of Albanian iso-polyphony and other folk music that is held in Gjirokastër, the ancient “stone city” in southern Albania, every five years. Due to COVID-19, it has been eight years since the last festival. The audience buzzes with excitement.
Yet backstage a threat hangs in the air. This music that records Albania’s history is being forgotten by younger generations who continue to leave the country in record numbers or who show little interest in learning from Shehu and other celebrated artists, even if they do stay in Albania.
This must change, says Vasil Tole, an Albanian composer and ethnomusicologist who doubles as head of Albania’s Department of Cultural Heritage in the Ministry of Culture. Otherwise, these societal songs that have been “the autobiography of a nation” may pass into oblivion, he warns.
Shehu and other musicians share Tole’s concern.
The interest is there, Tole says. The challenge is getting the younger generations to not only enjoy the music but to engage with it and learn its history. “Our songs record profound things in life like lamentation, respect for the dead, love, emigration and heroes,” says Tole. “Polyphony is vital to Albanian culture.”
Backstage, a festival organizer yells “pesë minuta!”—five minutes—as a young female group of about 20 races to pull on gold-trimmed boots, blood-red headscarves and floral petticoats that took 12 months to embroider. When the women gather on the stage, they, too, are greeted by hundreds of cellphones held aloft. These recordings will soon be uploaded, shared and even remixed by Albanian enthusiasts here and around the world.
This unique singing style consists of a lead singer calling out a sort of recitative and two-, three- and four-part harmonizing around him. Historians believe this tradition dates back to the Illyrians, an Iron Age society that inhabited the western Balkan Peninsula for more than a thousand years. “The hypothesis is that iso-polyphony predates the Romans or any other of Albania’s many invaders,” Tole says.
Over the centuries, Illyrian shepherds and farmers, from whom Albanians descend, honed the craft. They would holler across valleys of the eastern Balkans, covering much of present-day Albania and bordering Greece, North Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro. The group’s iso-polyphonic chant is initiated by the “starter,” or ia merr, who passes her tune to a second singer known as a “turner,” creating a harmonious polyphony. She “turns” her solo to a third “thrower,” or a fourth or fifth shepherd who would join in the iso, or drone, which completes a pitch-perfect note struck by a backing ensemble.
Nature evolved the music further. Harmonies mirrored gushing rivers. Iso drones mimicked thunder. Cowbells copied the sound of grazing animals. Although iso-polyphony predates musical instruments and uses a pentatonic scale, the simplest five-note schema, their slow introduction—including bagpipes, accordion and violin—added extra “voices” to the mix over the centuries. “The instruments generally imitate sounds from nature,” explains Tole.
Albania’s lofty topography served to protect the art form from the cultural impacts of lowland invaders, while further influencing the style. For example, singers from mountainous areas like Gjirokastër tend to influence the style with louder and deeper tones that help the melody carry farther. And vocalists from seaside destinations like Vlorë, Albania’s third-largest city, tend to sing at a quieter yet higher pitch.
Before Albanian written history, a recent occurrence, iso-polyphony became a millennia-old chronicle as the songs were vital to weddings, funerals, harvests, festivals and other social events. “It served as a means for the preservation and transmission of different stories, tales, narratives,” Tole says. “For example, some Muslims sing the history of their religion in polyphonic songs.”
After Europe’s strictest form of communism took hold in Albania, with a communist government ruling the country from 1946 to 1991, iso-polyphony became even more popular. Authorities deemed singing folk music a positive national pastime while banning foreign music—alongside beards, long hair, overseas travel and Western movies. For decades the capital’s music station, Radio Tirana, played only traditional Albanian music. In a land devoid of The Rolling Stones and Bon Jovi, iso-polyphony thrived.
Shehu made his performing debut at the Gjirokastër National Folklore Festival in 1978 at age 16. Born in Gjirokastër, Shehu was inspired to take up singing by his mother and father (his father was also a singer of some repute). The experience of standing onstage that day transformed the then-teen’s life, when all the hours of listening and harmonizing with other singers in his community really paid off. “At the castle of Gjirokastër, for me, it was a special moment,” Shehu recalls. “Since then, I never missed any festival.”
Communism collapsed in Albania in 1992, sparking a cataclysmic revolution. The effect on iso-polyphony was twofold. “Teenagers could suddenly listen to any pop music,” remembers Edit Pula, a music producer and artistic director who grew up under communist rule. Though iso-polyphony had been used for two millennia, it vanished from [Albanians’] ears. “We even danced to Arabian music—anything that was different,” she says.
In post-communist Albania, the youngest of Albania’s three million population went abroad to find work. According to the United Nations International Organization for Migration, by the following decade, more than 700,000 Albanians had emigrated.
At the same time, long-standing singing ensembles separated, music schools shut down and even teaching methods started to be forgotten. “Our system broke along with all our industries,” Pula says. “There was a bit of a gap where youngsters didn’t understand or care about iso-polyphony.”
The fight to safeguard iso-polyphony began in the mid-2000s. Realizing the form was in decline, Tole prepared a dossier comprising every facet of the music style, from its techniques to its history, helping secure a place for Albanian iso-polyphony on the UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage list by 2008. He compares it to jazz in America. “Both are communal forms of improvisatory music,” he says.
The UNESCO status raised the music’s profile, and soon tourists began showing up in towns specializing in iso-polyphony. “When foreign tourists come and visit Butrint or Gjirokastër,” only an hour’s drive apart, explains Tole, “what do they ask to see? A group of polyphonic singers.”
At the same time, the advent of YouTube, smartphones and other technological innovations made it possible for anyone to begin preserving the music. Streaming has evolved the art electronically, with Albanian deejays like RDN mixing ambient dance beats to help modernize and popularize iso-polyphony tracks for a lost generation. This practice is not without controversy, however. “Iso-polyphony is the voice of our ancestors,” warns Tole, “so you can’t kick it too much.”
While deejays are remixing, others like septuagenarian singer Shkelqim Beshiraj have begun uploading YouTube videos of themselves bellowing from rural mountaintops, with some logging as many as 1 million views. He traveled from Italy, where he is based, to join the 2023 Gjirokastër festival. “This year is the biggest festival yet,” he says.
Orion Demirxhiu, aged 13, also records videos of himself performing and looks forward to his own performance at the festival later in the evening. “This tradition is important,” asserts Demirxhiu, who claims that iso-polyphony beats Netflix any day. “Every time we go on a family gathering, in a car or a cafe, we always sing the most beautiful songs you’ve ever heard.”
Pula, the music producer, presides over the most recent beacon of hope. In 2022, she opened an iso-polyphony museum beneath Gjirokastër’s Bazaar Mosque, an 18th-century mosque that sits directly below the castle alongside a network of subterranean Cold War-era bunkers. One section has been turned into a sound tunnel that streams iso-polyphonic tunes into a dark, dank chamber. The museum and its tunnels are all part of her quest to spark people’s interest by making music more accessible.
Pula admits that preserving the traditional musical style remains a challenge. “Twenty-year-olds are streaming what’s in fashion like Dua Lipa,” the British-Albanian pop star whose Kosovo Albanian parents fled the Balkans in 1992. Meanwhile, the songs of Shehu and other master singers are on a few youngsters’ playlists. Pula hopes at least her visitors “come out of the museum knowing an Iso-polyphony for Dummies.”
Of course, not everyone is positive about the music’s digital evolution. One of the principal themes of iso-polyphony is expressing lamentations for times gone by. For some, even the videos proliferating online signal something has already been lost.
As Gjirokastër prepares for night two of the festival, Shehu is in a lamentable mood. Sitting on his balcony terrace looking across to the Gjirokastër fortress, he explains the sorrowful expression of iso-polyphony comes out of life experiences. “Perhaps you’re at a wedding,” he says. But instead of lyricizing happy thoughts, “you see a mother crying as her daughter moves to a new home. Everyone who feels their soul can write verses.”
The pairing of modern music with iso-polyphony distresses Shehu. In 2023, the grand master came across a TikTok video through one of his daughters (two of his other children have emigrated to the US) that spliced his songs with contemporary beats. “The new generation hears remixes and copies things,” he says. “I dedicated my life to creating 500 new pieces of music. This next generation is copying, not creating.”
So, the art, as Shehu sees it, cannot develop via technology alone. But it continues on in other ways.
In the Gjirokastër fortress, Ilir Loku is warming up for night two of the festival. He is dressed like a handsome brigand from Hollywood’s central casting and carries a broadsword and a bow. Aged 40, Loku is part of the roughly 30,000-strong Albanian diaspora in Montenegro, where his ethnic group once faced discrimination. This only made Loku and the other performers in his troupe more determined to preserve the tradition. “We could only sing these songs at home,” he says. “People fought for us to wear these costumes.”
Kristaq Gerveni, a 64-year-old submariner from the city of Vlorë, some 130 kilometers northwest of Gjirokastër, has experienced firsthand how this music survives in the Albanian diaspora. His family originated in the Korçë region, along the Albania-Greece border, he says, before his Aromanian-speaking community was deported during a Balkan conflict over two centuries ago. Twenty family members are present this evening, with several about to go onstage. The reason is simple: “Our iso-polyphonic songs are in the language of our ancestors.”
Near midnight an impromptu group unites in song outside Gjirokastër mosque. After the starter and turner sing the polyphonic verses, anyone can join in the chorus, even if they don’t know the words. “The magic of iso-polyphony is that it doesn’t have a lot of verses,” Tole says.
For Shehu, the magic resides in the very timelessness of this age-old art form. He has a theory that tradition comes from a place everyone understands. Maybe it started with a single Albanian walking alone at night, he imagines. When others joined in, that first person would know they had an entire community at their back. “You’d sing when you’re scared,” he says. “And your song was reassured by a second person.”
Although Shehu worries about the future of iso-polyphony, he tries to focus on the music. “For the next generations it’s difficult,” he explains. “But it is part of me, and as long as I have my eyes open, inshallah, I will do it.”