Germans map Aleppo’s rebirth
Scholars produce blueprint to return city to former glory
COTTBUS // With its buildings pulverised and reduced to skeletons, one of the world’s oldest cities, Aleppo, has been devastated by the war in Syria.
In Germany, scholars are preparing for its reconstruction by creating a highly detailed map of Aleppo and its treasures, long listed as a Unesco world heritage site.
In a bright office of a university campus in Cottbus in the former East Germany, urban planner Christoph Wessling spreads a map across his desk. Measuring 2 metres by 2.5 metres and drawn to a scale of 1:500, it shows the labyrinth of alleys and streets of Aleppo, replicating the walled ancient city with its souqs, bath houses, mosques, churches and homes with infinite precision and loving detail.
All in, about 16,000 plots have been traced, as well as 400 floor plans of the main buildings of the city, which has been inhabited for more than 6,000 years.
Aleppo was a city of hidden gems, said Mr Wessling, who often visited the northern Syrian metropolis before the war started in 2011.
“In Aleppo, we would enter a house whose austere facade was absolutely nothing special,” he said. “And then suddenly we came upon a chain of three enchanting inner courtyards with richly decorated pillars.” The war divided Aleppo between rebels in the east and government loyalists in the west, and set the scene for last year’s major humanitarian tragedy, before it was captured by the army of president Bashar Al Assad, backed by Russia and Iran.
In the coming weeks, the map, created by six experts with a budget of €60,000 (Dh246,380), will be put online and made available to anyone who wishes to take part in Aleppo’s eventual reconstruction.
The online map would feature “all the site plans, photos and descriptions of a given place”, said the university, which is handling the project with the German foreign ministry and the German archaeological institute.
The aim is to lay a foundation for Aleppo to recover its old splendour – assuming that construction companies can be stopped from bulldozing the ruins and replacing them with hotels and shopping malls.
Aleppo native Zeido Zeido, 29, a student in Cottbus who is preparing a doctoral thesis on his hometown, warns against excessive attention to the old city. Other districts with more recent architectural styles – which are not rated by Unesco – also require preservation, such as late 19th- century buildings from Aleppo’s time as one of the most important cities in the Ottoman empire.
The challenge of reconstruction would be immense, said researchers at the Cottbus faculty of architecture. According to Unesco, about 60 per cent of the old city has been badly damaged and, of this area, 30 per cent has been totally destroyed.
In the souq, once one of the largest covered markets in the world, the stalls and wooden doors of the market have been reduced to ashes. The minaret of the famed Umayyad mosque collapsed four years ago, and the monumental Citadel has suffered “considerable damage”, as have the caravan stops once used by Silk Road traders.
The Technical University of Brandenburg in Cottbus campus was chosen to create the map because its architecture faculty has a long tradition of exchanges with its counterpart in Aleppo.
Also, Germany has a wealth of experience in rebuilding cities, given the bombing of the Second World War and the restoration of many urban centres after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990.