Rediscovering traditions

Despite war and sanctions Heike Weber, a septuagenarian German woman, carries on with her mission to preserve the embroideries of Syria and Palestine. This effort preserves these countries’ cultural heritage while giving poor women the means to earn a living. For the past 40 years, she has taught Palestinian and Syrian women embroidery, weaving, and dress design. Before war erupted in Syria in 2011, she employed 1,000 women whose fine work stocked an upmarket shop near Bab al-Sharqi (the Eastern Gate) in the Old City of Damascus. The shop was named Anat, after the ancient Semitic goddess of nature, life and death. Anat had both in-person and on-line customers.

After the war, the shop closed and most of the women could no longer work. Today, 60-70 are making embroidered items of clothing, handbags and wall hangings for display and sale in a room at the prominent Zawaya Art Gallery at St. Thomas Gate. Customers are few. There are no tourists, many wealthy Syrians have left, others do not have money to spend on high quality pieces. Online sales are a problem because US-driven Western sanctions have disrupted post from Syria to the world. Nevertheless, Heike is determined to maintain the connection between Syrians in the diaspora and at home and introduce others to Syrian handicrafts. Her book, “Anat And Her Hero Baal: The Embroidery Pattern Language of the Levant,” was exhibited and sold along with embroidered articles at Expo 2020 in Dubai.

Heike works constantly. She has to prepare each piece for the women who continue to embroider and sew at this time of severe economic hardship. She spends entire days cutting out patterns and stitching in her workroom or in the elegant arched liwan of her early-17th-late-18th century Ottoman house near Mariyamieh Church in Damascus Old City.

She learned the craft of embroidery as a child by sitting beside her German grandmother and was tutored in Palestinian embroidery by her beloved mother-in-law Bannoura Khalawi who, like most Palestinians, became a refugee during Israel’s 1948 war of establishment.

“I was born in Berlin and studied literature and musical science at the Free University of Berlin,” she told Gulf Today. She married a Palestinian and arrived in Beirut just before Israel launched its 1982 war against the Lebanon-based Palestine Liberation Organisation. “We were put on a ship and evacuated to Tartous in Syria,” where they settled close to the Yarmouk Palestinian camp near Damascus. “When I came here I was not fluent in Arabic, so I wanted to learn the language better and get to know women” outside their family circle. When she launched an embroidery course, women came and said they wanted to work.

While studying Palestinian embroideries she started a workshop. She did not intend to go on for long but wanted to hand over to the women but the work grew and they had to make fresh designs. In the neighbourhood, there were also Syrians from Idlib, Sweida and other areas so the project embraced these women as well. “The Syrian women said we also have nice embroidery, so I also studied Syrian embroidery. They took me to their villages” which they had left at the end of the 20th century because they thought they would have a better future in the city. I got to know the Syria villages and to work with women there.”

The business was very productive between 2000-2011. Women worked at home while Anat had 30 employees for finishing and marketing. Although there was a larger variety of techniques in Syria than in Palestine, the women did not known them. Heike had to look at old dresses to rediscover traditional patterns before teaching them to the women. The women were very good in embroidering, but their finishing was “not so professional.” Heike continued to design.

“We always had the idea that embroidery is a living art. It always develops, it cannot stand still. Some people said embroidery must stay the same with traditional dresses but when it does not move with the development of a society, it becomes a dead thing, something for a museum, something [for wearing at] a national feast. It will not stay alive and be part of everyday life. We tried to make fashionable things based on the study of the embroidery. You cannot just renew something. You must understand why people did embroidery, what they meant by embroidering in order to make something that is appropriate and not destroying tradition but adap-ting it. This was always our aim.”

Heike introduced Syrian embroidery which was not well preserved and well known as was Palestinian work which was produced in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine. Syrians who visited Anat did not know their own embroidery. “For Palestinians, embroidery was very important because they were driven out of their country. In order to keep their national identity they focused on this tradition.”

This forged a connection between poor Palestinians inside their country and rich ones outside. “Traditions are important because they determine how you celebrate your feasts, how you say hello, how you speak with each other, all this gives you roots and national identity. When you are uprooted, you become like a feather in the wind. You can be driven here and there and you have nothing that ties your personality to your society.”

She had to learn a about Syrian textile handicrafts which are very elaborate and complicated. For centuries, she said, “Syria was the meeting point of the known world. Northern Syria, especially, which was caught between different empires.” Traditional crafts were greatly developed.

The embroideries became so good that Anat exhibited in Germany and Britain and sold them at high prices. “The women used their earnings to pay debts, repair their houses, and buy animals. The villagers of Jabal al-Hoss near Aleppo, where schooling stopped at the sixth grade, bought three mini buses to take their children to the secondary school at a nearby town. “The families paid one-third and we paid two-thirds.” At first nearly half who went were girls” but later on they were the majority. Girls went to university, boys to the army.

The villagers were forced to flee during the war, their mudbrick homes were looted, and are becoming derelict because the mud plaster needs to be renewed annually. The February earthquakes took a toll. Without tending, the land could become desert. “The people want to go back. They are longing for their life before the war. They were poor but had the essentials for living. Now they are hungry.”

Fighting disrupted everything. Her team could not reach the countryside. Employees could not get to work. Some left the country or went back to their villages. “From 2013 until 2019, we did not produce at all. I did not think we could start again but in 2020 I made an exhibition of embroidered panels in honour of the embroiderers.” When the women found she was still in Damascus, they wanted to start again. Everything became much more expensive. A spool of French cotton thread which was $1 has become $2 thanks to sanctions.