Syrien

The series with photographs from Syria, mainly from Damascus and Aleppo was created in November 1999. In these pictures, Stefanie Bürkle tries to portray the two cities and their 5,000-year history of development from her perspective. Her gaze touches on the historical as well as the very present and everyday construction sites and fractures in the urban fabric.

In order to understand the difficulties in preserving the old cities of Aleppo and Damascus, Stefanie Bürkle also looks at the outskirts of the historic cities. And finds there, on the one hand, the state-imposed settlement structures and, on the other, illegal buildings as a result of the rural exodus on the one hand and the inner-city exodus of the “middle class” on the other. Thus, in the unrenovated historic old city of Aleppo remain predominantly poor urbanites or newly arrived rural population .This causes a ruralization of the old city, while the landscape surrounding the city is increasingly urbanized.

The photo series shown above shows everyday images from Hama, the city between Damascus and Aleppo with 350,000 inhabitants at the time, where in 1982 the Syrian armed forces used heavy weapons against the Muslim Brotherhood.