REPORTAGE : Maaloula 1

Par  49 photographies - 06 décembre 2025

In the second half of 2025, one year after the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime, Syria confronts itself. After decades of European influence, sixty years of military dictatorship under the guise of pan-Arab politics, and thirteen years of civil war, the country enters an uncertain “year zero,” where old structures have collapsed while new ones remain fragile and unresolved.
This work moves through a Syria where daily life cautiously resumes in Damascus and Aleppo, with cafés reopening and a distant hope of normality—and perhaps tourism—slowly re-emerging. In Maaloula, the Feast of the Holy Cross is celebrated in reduced form, reflecting fear of possible ISIS attacks. In the capital, marches after Friday prayers at the Umayyad Mosque signal the end of repression and the reoccupation of public space. Elsewhere, fractures remain visible: an Israeli raid in Beit Jinn, severe healthcare shortages in rural Idlib, landfill workers in Aleppo surviving at the margins of the postwar economy, and life gradually returning among the ruins of Yarmouk. Across cities and peripheries, displaced camps have become permanent settlements, informal economies thrive, bureaucracy reshapes itself unevenly, and acts of revenge coexist with attempts at reconciliation. Minorities, power, and the redefinition of Syria’s social fabric now stand at the center of the country’s future. Like parts of Europe after World War II, Syria appears suspended between devastation and reinvention, navigating uncertainty alongside fragile signs of renewal. In this sense, contemporary Syria becomes a lens through which the complexity of reality emerges and where identities are continuously shaped through negotiation between individuals and their context, across both continuity and transformation.