In northern Syria, domed houses are disappearing

“Our village had 3.000 to 3.500 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 took over.

The war has left half a million dead and millions of Syrians are refugees in neighboring countries or displaced within their own country.

“Today, no more than 200 of us have returned,” adds this fifty-year-old with a sunburned face. He wanders through the deserted houses, his own and those of his loved ones, showing the walls that are cracking and the ceilings that are almost 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 the bad state they are in,” laments this father of nine children.

In the neighboring village of Haqla, Jamal Al Ali, sitting on a mat, has 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 mud houses are a thousand times better” than the others, he explains, “it is good in winter and cool in summer”.

“But there is no more water, no more electricity. The mud houses are crumbling, and there is no one to repair them.”

Ancestral know-how

Due to the exodus caused by the war, the region 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 knows how to build such houses.

“I myself learned this trade at the age of 14, because in our villages, every time someone wanted to build a mud house, all the other inhabitants helped them,” he says. to AFP from the Bekaa plain, bordering Syria.

“Today, due to the war, houses are disappearing and so are our jobs,” he says.

It is in the Bekaa where a large part of the Syrian refugees are concentrated that a Lebanese NGO, Arcenciel, used its services to recreate these traditional houses.

“It is an ecological vernacular architecture, built with a single material, raw earth brick, recyclable as desired, insulating and which filters odors”, explains to AFP the Lebanese architect Fadlallah Dagher, who collaborated on the project .

“It is assumed that this technique originated in the Neolithic period, around 8.000 years ago, and spread to northeastern Syria and Anatolia,” he adds.

He emphasizes that "these sugar loaf houses are built without any scaffolding, because in northern Syria there are not many trees and therefore little construction wood."

The architect indicates that the aim of the 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".