It’s been a whirlwind for Beirut. Lebanon’s capital has spent the past twenty years trying to rebuild itself and its identity. I grew up in a city marked by scars of a brutal civil war, scars that could be found as often on buildings as on people. The dichotomy of Beirut’s architecture is an apt lens with which to understand the city. Its landscape is made of new skyscrapers juxtaposed with old buildings that are now partly destroyed. Amongst these are the Heritage Houses of Beirut. These houses are traditionally adorned with red-tiled roofs, stained-glass windows, high-ceilings and hand-carved wooden windows. Each house bears its own unique style and is surrounded by luscious gardens. Each carries a stain of this city’s tumultuous history. These homes have survived countless brutalities, including the more recent Beirut Blast (the third largest explosion in the world). Some are flimsy, some are broken but what matters is what is still. They are a witness to Beirut’s history and carry a part of our legacy - one that desperately needs to be preserved.
It all began with the Pink House. Shortly after the end of the civil war, my mother, Nayla Audi moved back to Beirut. As she rediscovered her hometown, she recognized the fragility of the traditional Lebanese houses and their lack of power against big real estate developers. When my mother heard that the Pink House was going to be destroyed, she launched a campaign to “Save the Houses of Beirut”. She couldn’t reconcile raising children to be proud of their culture in a country stripped of its own heritage. The campaign evolved and became “The Houses of Beirut”, simultaneously an art project, a children’s book and an ode to her beloved Beirut. She commissioned Lebanese artist Flavia Codsi to paint watercolors of seven traditional houses around Beirut, showcasing different attributes of Lebanese Heritage. The book’s story follows the journey of two young girls discovering their city’s culture. Today, each one of these houses stands still, in a different neighbourhood, of a different colour - and for a fleeting moment, Beirut is still as it was.
Every one of these Heritage houses has shaped me, especially the one I am lucky to call home. I grew up in the White House in Gemmayze, a few hundred meters away from the port. We only realised how close we were to the sea on 04.08.20, when the Beirut port explosion demolished our house. While going through the remnants of our splintered home, my sister Yasmine and I found a copy of the original print of “The Houses of Beirut”. While peeling through the book’s colourful illustrations, the houses of our shaken city stood still—just as they were before.
We decided to publish a new edition of the book. We worked with Anis, one of the oldest printing presses in Beirut that had printed and hand-binded the first edition. They still use the same technique as 24 years ago. We also chose to partner with Beirut Heritage Initiative (BHI), an independent and inclusive collective, that aims to preserve the social and urban fabric of Beirut through Heritage preservation and restoration. You can read more about their impressive work here.
All of the profits from our sales are donated towards preserving our national heritage and rebuilding these houses. Our home is a tiny fragment of the larger oasis of peace and culture that has been broken in Beirut, but as long as these houses still stand, there still is hope. Each one of them represent our diverse, colourful heritage – one that is fleeting away. It is important, now more than ever to preserve what is left of our cultural identity.
With that, we warmly invite you to discover the “Houses of Beirut” book in London. Please join us on the 31st of March from 5-8pm at Sapling Gallery.
www.thehousesofbeirut.com
Long before Rome’s power, Babylon’s hanging gardens, or the great palaces of Persepolis, there was ‘Balkh’—the shining jewel of the ancient world. ...
A shipment of one of our wooden Jali trays was recently held by Border Force. When we finally received the package, we unwrapped the packaging to find that Border Force had drilled a small hole through the tray.
The Kabul you haven’t heard of; where storytelling shapes its soul.
“I love my glasses and my husband wants to buy me some more. But I’m concerned about supporting a regime which is so oppressive to women. I’ve neve...
Mathilda Della Torre is a designer and activist whose work focuses on creating projects and campaigns that transition us to a sustainable, fair, an...
One reason we wanted a physical ISHKAR shop was so that we could host events, talks, supper clubs, screenings, exhibitions, etc. A place to join wi...
Ruby Elmhirst is a creative producer, working with sustainable and socially conscious designers, artists and brands on unique projects across an array of mediums. Originally from London, her family lives between rural Jamaica and New York. This contrast has vastly informed her mission to promote opportunity, acceptance, education and diversity within design. For this edit she shares her interior wishlist as we get into winter and spend more time indoors.
We spoke to Niloufar Edmonds, the curator of 'Bound for Life and Education: Sara Eshonturaeva and the Jadid Movement in Soviet Uzbekistan' about th...
'My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird' is an extraordinary anthology of fiction by Afghan women writers, published in Feb 2022 by MacLehose Press in the UK...
For the Print Sale for EMERGENCY 2022, some of the photographers are offering one-off prints as NFTs, some for the first time!Including Matthieu Paley, Glen Wilde & Michael Christopher Brown.
On the 15th of August 2021, Afghanistan fell to the Taliban. As the world looked on, ISHKAR launched a sale of photographic prints to raise money for EMERGENCY Hospitals in Afghanistan. Like you, thousands of generous people contributed.
One year later the world’s attention has moved on. However the situation in Afghanistan is getting worse and worse. We’ve teamed up with an amazing group of photographers to run the print sale again. This is our opportunity to show Afghanistan that we still care. That we have not forgotten. This is our chance to direct crucial aid to where it is needed most.
Our handmade shirts and soap stone bowls, photographed by Charles Thiefaine on the island of Socotra, Yemen. November 2021.
When Afghanistan fell to the Taliban we immediately paused trading with Afghanistan. After much deliberation, we have now taken the decision to con...
Selma Dabbagh is a British Palestinian lawyer, novelist and short story writer. We asked Selma which ISHKAR pieces are inspiring her this winter. See here selection here:
Now is not the time to stop reading, talking and thinking about Afghanistan. The situation continues to worsen by the day. So we've put together a few actions that you can take to make sure the world doesn't turn its back on Afghanistan, when it needs us all the most.
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Olivia Rose Empson
- 06.10.21
Mosul, a city in the North of Iraq, is gradually remembering the steps to a long forgotten tune. Once a vibrant area with art, coffee shops and lo...
Lebanese-Dutch Carmen Atiyah de Baets is CARMEN’s co-founder, a multifunctional guesthouse, kitchen, gallery and shop in the heart of Amsterdam.
Sicily is famous for its street food, from freshly cooked calamari to crisply fried panella. One of our favourite Sicilian streets are Arancini....
This summer we will be hosting different pop ups on London's Columbia Road, home to some of London's best restaurants, street bars and independent boutiques. Combine your pop up visit with some of these local highlights:
Ibi Ibrahim is an American Yemeni curator, artist, writer, filmmaker and musician.
Words by Shamayel, founder of Blingistan. Illustrations by Blingistan + Daughters of Witches.
How many of these five extraordinary women have you h...
We spoke with Blingistan founder, Shamayel, about the need for playful, bold, conversation starters that can change the narrative about Afghanistan.
We invited James Seaton, co-founder of TOAST, to cast his well trained design eye over our collection and to be our very first guest editor.
How, we are often asked, can a box of six glasses made in Afghanistan, one of the world’s poorest countries, be sold in London for £80? In this blog post we aim to show you who gets what and why.
This is the time for facts, not fear. This is the time for science, not rumours. This is the time for solidarity, not stigma. We are all in this together, and we can only stop it together.
A guest blog by Lucy Fisher I would like to hazard a guess that the first image which comes to mind when asked to think of Afghanistan is probably not a garden in full bloom, carefully tended to by a team of dedicated local gardeners. Despite the horrific turmoil...
A guest blog by Louis Prosser After almost four years of incalculable destruction and suffering in Yemen, you might think that the last sparks of beauty and creativity had been crushed. You would be wrong.Ibi Ibrahim is a 31-year-old artist working mainly in photography and film. He is Yemeni,...
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Fig 1. Babur gardens [source unknown]
Fig 2. One of the hospital's where Dr Jerry used to work[source unknown]
W...
‘I don’t care if you’re in Timbuktu,’ we might say. ‘You’ll be here tomorrow or else!’ Or perhaps, ‘He’s flirted with every girl from here to Timbuktu!’ It means something like God Knows Where, or A Million Miles Away.
'Bebinin, bebinin,' insisted Parsa. I was in the royal city of Esfahan, which the Persians call 'nesf-e jahan' ('half of the world'). In a cramped bazar beneath soaring domes and arches, I was in a world of carpets. 'Look, look: apache, apache!’ The word rang a bell (an American tribe?) but it took me a few seconds to see. It was a truly beautiful piece.
The Pin Project is an initiative ISHKAR launched on Kickstarter last year. We raised over £63,000 to provide jewellery training and work for displaced people living in Burkina Faso, Turkey, Jordan and Afghanistan.
Give a child a packet of crayons and tell them to draw a fantasy island, and they might well conjure up the Yemeni island of Soqotra.
As humans, we crave order. For many, productive work provides this structure. The world around us might be chaotic. But with work we can, at least at times, control what we do in a way we are rarely able in other parts of life.
At the beginning of this year, Flore and I found ourselves at the world trade fair for homewares, Maison et Objet in Paris. After a morning of walking through the colossal trade halls we were quite frankly bored of looking at objects. We were just about to escape and get a coffee when we came across Sebastian Cox’s stand.
Once a hipster trend, the desire for handmade goods has become thoroughly mainstream. It can be seen from the meteoric rise of Etsy, right through to proliferation of the word ‘artisan’ on products ranging from shoes to bread. Handmade products tend to be more expensive, and by no means assure better ‘quality’, so what’s all the fuss about?
As wedding season approaches, we have been getting an increasing number of exasperated customers asking when our most popular glasses will be back in stock again. Well, here's the honest answer – we have NO idea.
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Fig 1. Traces of Aleppo [source unknown]
Zaina Sabbagh bought her first wooden printing block when she was 14. Sh...
I remember singing a nursery rhyme about Timbuktu when I was in primary school. I can’t remember what it was now – was it ‘from Kalamazoo to Timbuktu’? – but I remember the images clearly. A fabled desert city at the end of the world where Arabs and Africans would meet to trade salt and gold, and in the cool of enormous mud structures blue robed scholars would scribble marginalia in great gold embossed manuscripts.
Yet we would be wrong to think of crafts as a small sector at the fringes of the global economy. Far from it, crafts are in fact the second largest employer in the developing world, and have a proven track record of leading a number of developing world countries towards developed world status.
The World Bank has ranked Afghanistan, as the 177th easiest country in which to do business with in the world. Unfortunately that was out of 188 economies. Here’s a quick barrage of some more dismal figures… In 2014 Afghanistan’s economy lost a third of its value, and annual economic growth slowed from 14% down to 1.5% where it hovers around today.
Every now and then a short video or article pops up on our newsfeed which tells a captivating story about Afghanistan or Syria that has nothing to do with war. For a couple of minutes we are reminded that countries like Afghanistan and Syria are home to talented, energetic people whose lives are not solely defined by the circumstances of the country in which they live. It’s a nice reminder, but we return to our day, forgetting about what we watched or read shortly after.
Theresa May’s recent triumph as Tory party leader reminded us of a controversial decision she took earlier this year. Despite 2015 being the most dangerous year to date in terms for civilian casualties, she successfully lifted the UK government’s blanket ban on deportations back to war-torn countries.
When we set up Peacock House last Christmas, we only intended to sell a handful of cufflinks in order to fund a nice post-Kabul holiday. The response we received was phenomenal, and we sold ten times the number of cufflinks we initially expected to sell! What started out as a week of work for the young group of jewellers we were working with in Kabul, turned into five weeks of full-time employment.
The closing of the Greek/Macedonian border in March left 15,000 refugees stranded in Idomeni. This area became the largest informal refugee camp in Europe since World War II.
Stepping out of Beirut airport you are immediately hit by the smell of rotting rubbish. It is a heady reminder of the rubbish crisis which hit Beirut a few months ago. With landfill sites overspilling, rubbish lined the streets of Beirut, piling up in forests and river beds surrounding the capital.
Whilst European leaders complain that Europe is reaching a critical point where it can no longer absorb any more refugees, and concerns over immigration have driven the UK towards an ignominious EU exit - with a population of just 4 million, Lebanon is home to more refugees than the whole of Europe combined.
I have recently taken up carpentry classes. I have no talent for making things with my hands, and the few things I’ve been able to make are very poorly put together. But for three hours a week I saw, I sharpen, I sand and I hammer. And it makes me feel good.
Outre le blog de Peacock House, de nombreux ouvrages/documentaires de qualité soulignent différentes facettes de l'Afghanistan. Ce pays a fait couler beaucoup d'encre au sujet de ses guerres, dont il a été le theatre depuis 1979, mais a su aussi seduire ses visiteurs par la richesse de ses montagnes et de ses habitants. L'Afghanistan se découvre aussi sous un autre jour..
In Winter, a thick cloud hangs over Kabul as people light wood and coal burning stoves to warm their homes. As a result the last few weeks Kabul’s weather has been described by Yahoo weather as ‘smoke’. We left the polluted capital, for the western city of Herat for a restorative break and to visit Hajji Sultan, the head of one of Herat’s last remaining glassmaking families.
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