Ilka Beling – författare

Book & CD. Aleppo is not perceived outside the Arab world as a "metropolis" -- at the same limo, though, the city with a five thousand year old history is one of the world's oldest cities. In this way, MYAL (My Aleppo) is to be understood as a special study about the development of the term metropolis and asks the fundamental question how a "metropolis" should be defined. Today, the city of almost three million people is the industrial and commercial capital of Syria, where, in a fascinating way, tradition and modernity, and East and West meet. MYAL (My Aleppo) attempts not only to show the "sights" of Aleppo, but to show the "inner sights" from the life of the Aleppines: city structures as well as life and customs that have been developed over centuries and now are subject to a rapid process of transformation due to altered social, economic, and political conditions. These are more everyday images of local people and foreigners, visible and invisible, from the narrow quarters of the Old City and the Souk with its noisy intimacy, the view from the Citadel out across the city, and from submerging into the partially strange and hidden worlds of Aleppo and its inhabitants. At the heart of the book are photos from the period around 1900 taken, among others, from the archive of Poche-Marrache and the archive from Thierry, Grandin, as well as photographs of different photographers from more recent years. These images are supplemented by articles From different authors about daily life in Aleppo. During the production of this book, a mood of change manifested itself in Syrian society, the results of which are not yet foreseeable. So, the articles in this volume perhaps document something that will (or may) soon belong in part to the past. The CD with songs from Abed Azrié from Aleppo completes the triad of the city along with the articles and photographs.