In northern Syria, traditional mud houses with graceful domes are disappearing, also victims of a war which has pushed their inhabitants into exodus. “Our village had 3000 to 3500 inhabitants and some 200 mud houses. But due to war and terrorism, the inhabitants left,” explains Mahmoud al-Mheilej in front of the abandoned ocher houses of his village. Oum Amouda Kabira is one of the few villages in the province of Aleppo to house this ancient traditional habitat. The region has seen its share of fighting since the war began in 2012, and was controlled by jihadists before the regular army regained the upper hand.
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The war has claimed half a million lives and millions of Syrians are refugees in neighboring countries or displaced within their own country. “Today, we are not more than 200 to have returned”, adds a fifty-year-old villager with a sunburned face. He wanders in the deserted houses, his own and those of his relatives, showing the walls which are cracking and the ceilings which are on the point of collapsing. This teacher now lives in a concrete house very close to traditional dwellings, built of raw earth mixed with straw. This friable material must be maintained regularly, “at least every two years due to wind and rain”, to last. “The houses are disappearing, look at what a bad state they are”, laments this father of nine children. In the nearby village of Haqla, Jamal Al Ali, sitting on a mat, is having breakfast with his large family in front of a concrete house. He too reluctantly abandoned his domed house. “We were born here and have always lived here (…) These earthen houses are a thousand times better” than the others, he explains, “it’s good in winter and cool in summer. But there is no more water, no more electricity. The earthen houses are crumbling, and there is no one to repair them”.
As a result of the exodus caused by the war, the region has lost its traditional masons and their know-how passed down for generations. Issa Khodr, a 58-year-old civil servant who fled the war to take refuge in neighboring Lebanon, is one of the few people who still know how to build such houses. “I learned this trade myself at the age of 14, because in our villages, every time someone wanted to build a house in the ground, all the other inhabitants helped him,” he says. from the Bekaa plain, bordering Syria. Then he adds: “Today, because of the war, the houses are disappearing and our job too”. It is in the Bekaa where a large part of the Syrian refugees are concentrated that a Lebanese NGO, Arcenciel , used his services to recreate these traditional houses. “It is an ecological vernacular architecture, built with a single material, raw earth brick, recyclable at will, insulating and which filters odors”, explains the Lebanese architect Fadlallah Dagher, who collaborated on the project. “And it is assumed that this technique was born in the Neolithic period, around 8,000 years ago, and spread in Northeast Syria and Anatolia,” he adds. He also points out that “these sugar loaf houses are built without any scaffolding, because in northern Syria there are not many trees and therefore little timber”. The architect still insists on the fact that the purpose of this workshop is to teach Syrian refugees this technique, “with the idea that, when they return to their devastated country, without resources, they could build their own houses. “.
