Sunken Treasures Exhibition Showcases Historic Maps of the Red Seahttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5290690-sunken-treasures-exhibition-showcases-historic-maps-red-sea
Sunken Treasures Exhibition Showcases Historic Maps of the Red Sea
Historic maps of the Red Sea on display at the "Sunken Treasures: The Maritime Heritage of the Red Sea" exhibition. (SPA)
Historic maps of the Red Sea on display at the "Sunken Treasures: The Maritime Heritage of the Red Sea" exhibition document the strategic importance of this vital maritime corridor and reflect how geographers, travelers, and cartographers viewed the region over the centuries.
More than geographical illustrations, the maps serve as historical records of the Red Sea's role as a gateway for trade, pilgrimage, and cultural exchange linking Asia, Africa, and Europe, the Saudi Press Agency said on Tuesday.
Among the exhibits at the Red Sea Museum is a 17th-century map that provides an early depiction of the region. It highlights mapmakers' understanding of the Red Sea's importance as a major maritime route connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean, while illustrating the ports and shipping routes that played a central role in global commerce.
The maps demonstrate how the Red Sea's strategic location made it a hub for economic and cultural exchange. Merchant vessels carrying spices, incense, textiles, and minerals sailed its waters alongside ships transporting pilgrims from across the Islamic world, establishing the Red Sea as one of history's busiest and most influential maritime routes.
The collection also reflects the evolution of geographical and navigational knowledge. Compiled using the expertise of sailors, captains, and travelers, the maps documented coastlines, islands, and ports, serving as essential references for maritime navigation before the advent of modern navigational technologies. They also illustrate the accumulation of scientific knowledge that deepened understanding of the Red Sea's geography and maritime environment.
Historic Jeddah Enriches Visitor Experience with Traditional Crafts and Cultural Activitieshttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5290688-historic-jeddah-enriches-visitor-experience-traditional-crafts-and-cultural
Historic Jeddah Enriches Visitor Experience with Traditional Crafts and Cultural Activities
Historic Jeddah offers immersive cultural experiences through interactive programs that combine learning with hands-on participation. (SPA)
Historic Jeddah offers immersive cultural experiences through interactive programs that combine learning with hands-on participation, enabling visitors to explore local heritage and discover traditional crafts in an environment that blends creativity and education, further strengthening its position as a vibrant cultural destination, the Saudi Press Agency said on Tuesday.
The activities featured a variety of workshops, including handmade bookbinding, mosaic art for children, painting on canvas bags, and crafting perfumes from natural ingredients, providing participants with opportunities to explore diverse artistic materials and techniques.
These activities reflect the concept of a comprehensive cultural experience by going beyond showcasing handicrafts to allowing visitors to observe production processes, interact with artisans, and participate in workshops, educational tours, and community programs, thereby deepening their understanding of traditional crafts and their historical and cultural significance.
The experience presents a model that uses culture to discover both place and people, transforming a visit to Historic Jeddah into an educational journey that extends beyond sightseeing by bringing together heritage, creativity, and community engagement, reinforcing the Kingdom’s cultural identity.
How Some in Palestinian Diaspora Find Connection, Identity and Resilience in Traditional Embroideryhttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5290259-how-some-palestinian-diaspora-find-connection-identity-and-resilience-traditional
A hand-embroidered map of historic Palestine with names of cities and the words “Palestine” and “Returning” in Arabic is displayed at the Inaash Association embroidery workshop in Beirut, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (AP)
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How Some in Palestinian Diaspora Find Connection, Identity and Resilience in Traditional Embroidery
A hand-embroidered map of historic Palestine with names of cities and the words “Palestine” and “Returning” in Arabic is displayed at the Inaash Association embroidery workshop in Beirut, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (AP)
Decades later, Samar Kabouli still fondly recalls gathering with women in her family and sipping cardamom-spiced coffee as they embroidered fabric with colorful threads in traditional Palestinian patterns.
Born in Lebanon to Palestinian refugees, Kabouli had never seen her parents’ homeland. But more than just making pretty designs, the threads in her needle were stitching a connection to her heritage.
It's known as “tatreez,” and Kabouli, 48, started doing the traditional form of Palestinian embroidery in her teens to make money. Besides an economic lifeline, tatreez has provided her with a bridge to the land her parents fled during the 1948 mass displacement that Palestinians call their Nakba, or catastrophe.
Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were expelled or fled their homes in present day Israel during the 1948 war surrounding Israel's creation. Israel refused their return.
Kabouli's work allows her to send a message of resilience, of survival.
“We’re still here,” she said. “All what has been happening in Gaza ... and we’re still standing and we’ll not forget the cause.”
From refugee camps to stitching circles and from museum halls to online classes, many in the Palestinian diaspora communities worldwide engage with tatreez as far more than a decorative aesthetic.
They're finding in it a celebration of cultural heritage, a bridge to their homeland and dispersed communities and — with its myriad embroidered symbols — a visual language of storytelling. To many, refugees or not, it's become a symbol of Palestinian identity and pride, a vehicle for documenting history and a form of resistance.
With the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, some have also used it to raise funds for people there or stitched designs to focus attention on Palestinian suffering in the enclave.
“We had a lot of people who came and they’re like, ‘OK, we want to do a T-shirt with a Gaza chest or we want to do a scarf with the Gaza motif,’” said Ali Jaafar, general manager of Inaash Association, where Kabouli works.
The Lebanese organization provides Palestinian women in refugee camps in Lebanon with much-needed income through tatreez, while also aiming to help preserve and promote the heritage. It sells embroidered fashion, home decor and art pieces, and showcases the art form in exhibitions and museums.
Palestinian weaver Samira Nasser works on a handmade embroidered piece at the Inaash Association embroidery workshop in Beirut, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (AP)
Protecting heritage and ‘struggling through culture’
Efforts to preserve and raise awareness about tatreez in Palestinian communities at home and abroad are part of a larger push to safeguard a heritage and connections to a history and a place that many fear are at risk of being erased.
“Palestinian tatreez is an identity and a document of our presence in every Palestinian village and town," said Maha Saca, founder and director of the Palestinian Heritage Center in Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, adding that old embroidered thobes, or dresses, show the presence of Palestinians in particular locations before the dispersal of many.
“The Palestinian woman has written the story of her village through motifs from her surrounding environment and her beliefs,” Saca said. “We’re struggling through culture and saying we have roots.”
The Palestinian embroidery art form was added in 2021 to UNESCO’s list of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.
In New York, Lina Barkawi, whose small business teaches tatreez, said the “constant fight for liberation and having a Palestinian identity that’s recognized globally is really what has been driving a lot of this documentation.”
Palestinian weaver Samar Kabouli works at the Inaash Association embroidery workshop in Beirut, Tuesday, May 19, 2026. (AP)
A generational practice and window into history
In Arabic, tatreez refers to embroidery in general as well as the specific Palestinian form, which is often a social practice taught through generations by grandmothers and mothers. Some seek formal training.
With motifs that Palestinian women had historically adopted from their surroundings, the old embroidered thobes can offer clues through stitched patterns, design and color about facets of a woman's personal story, her environment and regional identity, Saca said.
In the Palestinian context, such connections to time and place, including areas now in Israel, gain added importance as testament to what was, she said. “How do we have a Jaffa thobe if we hadn’t been in Jaffa?" she said. "We write history on our thobes.”
There's also an element of continuity. Her grandmother's embroidered wedding thobe bears the hallmarks of Bethlehem dresses, Saca said. Her own granddaughter's baptism dress included embroideries copied from that dress.
Tatreez also can be political, both through preservation and creation.
“Just being able to have some of the dresses from pre-1948 is a political act,” Barkawi said.
There's also the making of the so-called “intifada thobe” that included embroidered political and Palestinian symbols, such as the flag. It's linked to the “first intifada,” or uprising, which erupted in 1987 against Israel’s occupation and was met with a fierce Israeli response.
Stitching, mourning and documenting
After the war in Gaza, which was triggered by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, fashion designer Hama Hinnawi expressed grief through tatreez work. Tatreez is usually colorful, she said. But that was no moment for color.
The result? Black embroidery on black fabric, a statement of mourning for the killings, destruction and displacement in Gaza. She's also experimented with turning some iconic scenes from the war into new embroidery motifs.
“We have a big responsibility on our shoulders to tell this story, not to be buried for the next generations ... through tatreez, through art, through speaking.”
Born in Jordan to Palestinian parents, Hinnawi wanted to bring awareness to heritage through her fashion brand by marrying tatreez with contemporary fashion.
To her, tatreez simply means home. It’s “identity, pride, storytelling,” said Hinnawi, who shuttles between Chicago and Jordan.
She's provided embroidery work opportunities to Palestinian women in refugee camps in Jordan and talked in the US about tatreez. Before the war, she also worked with women in Gaza.
Barkawi runs an online community of Palestinian and non-Palestinian embroiderers, some of whom have created designs sold to raise funds for Gaza families. One incorporates a “water and seeds” motif with an embroidered message to “Feed Gaza Now.”
Members in different countries recreated a tapestry that once hung in a bombed Gaza home, each stitching a part and mailing it to another.
Born in the US to a Palestinian father and Panamanian mother, Barkawi said learning about tatreez deepened her Palestinian identity.
New dresses with woven stories
Embroidering her first thobe took two years. Barkawi incorporated motifs with personal meanings, such as palm trees that represent her name in Arabic. She added orchids, the national flower of Panama, for her mom.
Technically imperfect, it was the perfect dress for her Islamic marriage ceremony.
“I embedded my story as a Palestinian in the diaspora into this dress.”
In Lebanon, Kabouli, too, once dreamed of owning a tatreez piece for her wedding trousseau. She couldn’t afford one.
After their parents died, an older sister had turned to tatreez with Inaash to help support the large family. Kabouli learned from her.
Now a production supervisor at Inaash in Beirut, Kabouli sees her younger self in the women working in refugee camps in Lebanon, many in the south, which was hard hit by the latest Israel-Hezbollah war.
The vibrancy of tatreez often contrasts with harsh living conditions in camps amid employment and other restrictions the refugees face. Contending with power cuts, women, eager to finish a piece and get paid, may work on rooftops to grasp the last ray of sunlight, Jaafar said.
Besides the income, Kabouli said doing tatreez can be grounding, almost meditative.
She has another yearning: to see her parents’ homeland. They came from an area in what’s now Israel.
For now, tatreez provides her with hope.
“I don’t feel like I am far away. I keep working on Palestinian heritage, following the cause,” she said. “It connects me to my homeland, especially since we’re deprived of it.”
Heat Forces Yodelers at Annual Swiss Festival to Sing in Fountainshttps://english.aawsat.com/culture/5290067-heat-forces-yodelers-annual-swiss-festival-sing-fountains
Yodelers prepare for TV broadcast on the main festival stage at Petersplatz in Basel, Switzerland, Saturday, June 27, 2026. (AP)
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Heat Forces Yodelers at Annual Swiss Festival to Sing in Fountains
Yodelers prepare for TV broadcast on the main festival stage at Petersplatz in Basel, Switzerland, Saturday, June 27, 2026. (AP)
City fountains became impromptu rehearsal spaces this weekend as yodelers at a festival in Basel, Switzerland, squeezed in last-minute practice while cooling off during Europe’s June heat wave.
At one fountain, a folk band dipped their toes in the water on Saturday, as festivalgoers clapped along or cooled their hands under the flowing stream.
From Friday to Sunday, singers and alphorn players filled the streets and spontaneous bursts of yodeling echoed through restaurants, where diners initially reacted with surprise before joining in.
In Petersplatz, in central Basel, seamstresses remained on call throughout the festival to repair the traditional Alpine folk costumes worn by participants in case of emergency.
This year, however, it was the fountain rehearsals that became the festival’s defining image, as the city battled record temperatures of around 39 degrees Celsius (102 degrees Fahrenheit).
Around 12,000 performers and nearly 200,000 visitors traveled to Basel for the Eidgenössisches Jodlerfest, Switzerland’s national yodeling festival. It was the first time the northwestern Swiss city hosted the event since 1924.
Swiss yodeling was added to UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in December 2025, making this the first national festival since the tradition received international recognition. It is a distinction many Swiss take great pride in.
Unlike the brighter, more melodic style often associated with Austria and the Tyrol region, Swiss yodeling is slower and more melancholic — an emotionally nuanced tradition rooted in distinct regional dialects.
"I’ve always loved music, and I left here as a child. When I moved back to New Zealand, I wanted to stay connected to Swiss culture, so I joined a New Zealand-Swiss-Kiwi yodeling club,” said Freddie Conquer, a member of Jodlerclub Echo Basel, one of the clubs hosting the festival.
The participants competed in three disciplines: yodeling, alphorn playing and flag-throwing.
The alphorn is a long wooden instrument traditionally used by herdsmen in the Alps. It can stretch to more than 3 meters (10 feet) in length, with its sound carrying across valleys — or, during the festival, through Basel’s streets. It produces all of its pitches using natural harmonics alone, with no valves or keys.
“Everything is down to the mouthpiece, hearing the note in your head, and then using your lips to shape the pitch. The higher the note, the harder you have to blow,” said Pierre-André Karlen, who was rehearsing on a school lawn.
On Sunday morning, participants gathered outside the town hall, eagerly awaiting the competition results. Members of Jodlerklub Balfrin, from the town of Visp in the canton of Valais, were nervously examining the lists and later celebrated loudly after receiving a perfect score of one, one of several such teams.
As flags were carried through the old town during the festival’s closing parade, members of Jodlerklub Muttenz rode past on a tractor to cheers from the crowd. Alphorn players followed — their instruments and costumes almost certainly a burden in the heavy heat, but the smiles remained.
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