Goddess of the Vase

Artist Akram Saffan’s relief sculpture in the Euphrates Heritage House

Akram Saffan, Artist:

“I am very pleased to be participating in this remarkable initiative for the preservation of Deir ez-Zor’s heritage, in which a group of young people have come together to build this great cultural association. I always yearn for our history, specifically the history of the great Mari civilization. We are descendants of an ancient and important civilization, so we are not novel to these kind of activities.

I have attempted to create a work which brings together the ancient ‘Goddess of the Vase’, the suspension bridge of Deir ez-Zor, the Deir El’atiq building which has been destroyed during the last decade, and also the Al-Rahba fortress in Al Mayadin in order to preserve these memories and to rebuild what has been destroyed during the recent conflict.”

Suhail Ahmad, Historian:

“The work I have written titled ‘Beit Nahrein’ translates as ‘Mesopotamia’ in Aramaic Syriac. It reflects the heritage of the region located between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and the Euphrates region in general. It tells of a nostalgia where the past is considered as the baseline for the present and the future. Thus, when people recall something from history, they are in fact attempting to complement their future character.

The civilization in the region between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers dates date back to the 5th millennium BC. You cannot understand any civilization without understanding its language, as language is the corpus through which we are able to explore what happened in history. Eventually, to know a civilization, one should know the language, since language is the bridge which leads to the mental, intellectual and psychological particularities of any given nation.”

Translated by Ibrahim Kadouni, InArabic Ltd.