'Soul of Old Baghdad': City Center Sees Timid Revival

Iraqi students walk through Bab al-Wastani on a walking tour of the historic center of Baghdad. AHMAD AL-RUBAYE / AFP
Iraqi students walk through Bab al-Wastani on a walking tour of the historic center of Baghdad. AHMAD AL-RUBAYE / AFP
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'Soul of Old Baghdad': City Center Sees Timid Revival

Iraqi students walk through Bab al-Wastani on a walking tour of the historic center of Baghdad. AHMAD AL-RUBAYE / AFP
Iraqi students walk through Bab al-Wastani on a walking tour of the historic center of Baghdad. AHMAD AL-RUBAYE / AFP

An Iraqi professor leading a group of students on a walking tour of Baghdad's historic center invites them to stop and admire a centuries-old stone wall erected to shield the city from Mongol invaders.
Such a tour would have been unthinkable in the Iraqi capital through much of recent decades due to the country's successive wars, which saw Baghdad pounded from the air, targeted by suicide bombers and hit with car bomb attacks.
"Several caliphs worked on it," tour leader and professor Muaffaq al-Tai, 83, told the group as they passed under an impressive brick dome, smart phones and cameras in hand.
Braving an autumn heatwave, one of the tour organizers, Abdullah Imad, relished being able to help offer a deeper understanding of his hometown's history.
"Before, there were security events... interest was limited, almost non-existent," said architecture student Imad, 23.
"Now interest is growing... Stability has gradually returned to Baghdad," he told AFP.
"We want to show the public what Baghdad has to offer in terms of Islamic architecture, its value and identity."
Baghdad, founded in 762 AD by Abbasid caliph Abu Jaafar al-Mansur along the Tigris River, has long been a key hub in Arab and Islamic society.
In the 20th century, it thrived as a modern Arab city with top universities, a vibrant cultural scene and excellent healthcare.
However, decades of war and oppression from the late 1970s, including sectarian violence after the 2003 US-led invasion and the rise of the ISIS group in 2014, led to significant decline.
'Sites worth visiting'
A fragile stability has emerged since the defeat of ISIS in 2017 that has allowed a greater focus on Baghdad's infrastructure and cultural scene.
Around 30 students and amateur photographers strolled through downtown, passing an 800-year-old Abbasid palace with an inner courtyard adorned with brick facades, arches and arabesque reliefs.
They also visited Bab al-Wastani, or the Central Gate, built around the 12th century, featuring battlements and flanked by thick walls.
Fatima al-Moqdad, a 28-year-old architect, said the renewed interest in Iraq's heritage is "a source of hope for a positive change in our identity, and our heritage and its preservation".
"When young people surf the internet, they see how other nations look after their heritage. They want and deserve the same," she added.
"To be a tourist, you don't necessarily have to go abroad."
In Baghdad, home to nine million people, tuk-tuks, motorcycles and yellow cabs compete for space with porters pushing carts piled high with goods.
They push their way through the fish stalls, sunglasses vendors and counterfeit sneaker stands that have taken over the pavements of the historic center.
On the eastern bank of the Tigris, brutalist buildings from the 1960s stand alongside elaborate facades from the 1920s, decorated with flowery moldings and sagging wrought-iron balconies.
Around 2,400 buildings are registered in the historic center, but around 15 percent have been destroyed or altered, according to the municipality.
Many of the properties once belonged to Jewish families or other Iraqis driven out during one of the country's many upheavals.
The waves of emigration also resulted in a brain drain, depriving Iraq of expertise particularly in architectural restoration.
Restoration drive
The municipality, in partnership with an association of private banks, has taken on two major restoration projects, including Al-Mutanabi Street, famous for its many bookshops.
They are also restoring another street that houses the old Serail, or Ottoman Empire's seat of government.
The restoration has primarily involved repaving sidewalks, updating lighting and cleaning up facades.
Mohammed al-Soufi, an architect overseeing the restoration, noted the "aesthetic value of the brick buildings", dating from the 19th century and the 1920s and 1930s.
Among the many challenges in restoring the area is the difficulty in obtaining permission from the original owners, many of whom no longer live in Iraq, as well as a lack of funding.
The Baghdad municipality's next focus will be Al-Rashid Street, inaugurated in 1916.
"It's the soul of old Baghdad, its identity," said the municipality's head of communications Mohammed al-Rubaye.
But the once-vital artery now houses mostly warehouses, industrial machinery and motor oil stores. Authorities plan to move these activities to the outskirts.
"We're not telling people to leave. We're telling them to stay, but let's turn the wholesale warehouses into stores, cafes, cinemas and cultural and heritage sites," Rubaye said.



Han Kang Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

10 October 2024, Berlin: A customer in the bookstore Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus holds a book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang from South Korea. Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
10 October 2024, Berlin: A customer in the bookstore Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus holds a book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang from South Korea. Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
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Han Kang Wins Nobel Prize for Literature

10 October 2024, Berlin: A customer in the bookstore Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus holds a book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang from South Korea. Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa
10 October 2024, Berlin: A customer in the bookstore Dussmann das Kulturkaufhaus holds a book by 2024 Nobel Prize winner Han Kang from South Korea. Photo: Sebastian Gollnow/dpa

South Korean poet and novelist Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature Thursday for a poetic and unsettling body of work that the Nobel committee said “confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life.”
A slow-burning international literary star who has won multiple awards in South Korea and Europe, Han is the first Asian woman and the first South Korean writer to win the Nobel literature prize. She was awarded for books, including “The Vegetarian” and “Human Acts," that explore the pain of being human and the scars of Korea's turbulent history.
Nobel literature committee member Anna-Karin Palm said Han writes about “trauma, pain and loss,” whether individual or collective, “with the same compassion and care.”
“And this, I think, is something that is quite remarkable,” The Associated Press quoted Palm as saying.
Nobel committee chairman Anders Olsson praised Han’s “empathy for the vulnerable, often female lives” of her characters.
“She has a unique awareness of the connections between body and soul, the living and the dead,” Olsson said.
Han is the second South Korean national to win a Nobel Prize. Late former President Kim Dae-jung won the peace prize in 2000 for his efforts to restore democracy in South Korea during the country’s previous military rule and improve relations with war-divided rival North Korea.
Mats Malm, permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy that awards the prize, said he spoke to the author and surprised her with the news.
“She was having an ordinary day, it seems, had just finished supper with her son,” he said. “She wasn’t really prepared for this.”
Han wins the Nobel at a time of growing global influence of South Korean culture, which in recent years has included the success of films like director Bong Joon-ho’s Oscar-winning “ Parasite,” the Netflix survival drama “Squid Game” and the worldwide fame of K-pop groups like BTS and BLACKPINK.
Han, 53, won the International Booker Prize for fiction translated into English in 2016 for “The Vegetarian,” an unsettling novel in which a woman’s decision to stop eating meat has devastating consequences.
Accepting that award, Han said writing novels “is a way of questioning for me.”
“I just try to complete my questions through the process of my writing and I try to stay in the questions, sometimes painful, sometimes — well — sometimes demanding,” she said.
With “The Vegetarian,” she said, ”I wanted to question about being human and I wanted to describe a woman who desperately didn’t want to belong to the human race any longer."
Han made her publishing debut as a poet in 1993; her first short story collection was published in 1995 and her first novel, “Black Deer,” in 1998.
Works translated into English include “Greek Lessons” — about the relationship between a woman who can no longer speak and a teacher who is losing his sight — “Human Acts” and “The White Book,” a poetic novel that draws on the death of Han’s older sister shortly after birth. “The White Book” was an International Booker Prize finalist in 2018.
“Human Acts” — which Olsson, the Nobel committee chair, called a work of “witness literature” — is based on the real-life killing of pro-democracy protesters in Han’s home city of Gwangju in 1980. The book won Italy’s Malaparte Prize in 2017.
Her most recent novel, “We Do Not Part,” is due to be published in English next year. It also confronts a chapter in South Korea's 20th-century history, which saw the country endure war, the division of the Korean peninsula and dictatorship. The novel deals with a 1948-1949 uprising on Jeju, an island south of the Korean mainland in which thousands of people were killed.
Anders Karlsson, a lecturer at London's School of Oriental and African Studies who has translated Han into Swedish, said he was “overjoyed” at the Nobel accolade.
He said Han's “poignant, condensed” prose is able to describe “difficult and dark passages in South Korean history ... in quite open and inviting language that engages and does not deter the reader.”
The literature prize has long faced criticism that it is too focused on European and North American writers of style-heavy, story-light prose. It has also been male-dominated — Han is only the 18th woman among its 120 laureates.