Photo Gallery

Author : Andr Stevens
Publisher : Osmane Mounif AIDI Foundation for Heritage, Culture and                     Sciences /1999
Language : French, English, German

This book is a collection of old drawings and photographs from the early twentieth century, created by an architect and a photographer who worked as a counselor at UNESCO and many international institutions. He had visited Syria several times early in the twentieth century between 1930 and 1940,

and spent most of his life visiting historical places and giving lectures about antiquities .
Stevens says : As it was my personal wish, I decided to write a book on the works of my grandfather Professor Fernand Mayence who lived between 1879 and 1959, and supervised the first excavations of Apamea between 1930 and 1937, and which Eng. Dr. Osmane AIDI printed and published as a tribute to the contribution of my grandfather to the chronicle of the Apamea site.The Royal Museum in Belgium had allocated in 1933 a special hall in the name of Apamea Hall, opened by King Albert and Queen Elizabeth on the 18^th of March of the same year.
 

Fernand Mayence had made an explorative tour to Syria, then he led the Belgian excavation missions in Apamea as mentioned above. He was also the director of the Royal Museum of Art and History in Brussels. In the introduction of his book Stevens says : the abundance and variety of all forms of Syrian Heritage, i.e. archaeological, historical and cultural, is an eternal evidence of the traditions of the Near East. This special cultural heritage was built through many thousands of years as a testimony to the different civilizations which appeared and developed in Mesopotamia and the...

Mediterranean, particularly at that defined area which makes part of the fertile crescent, where the alphabet was born.
The Author begins the first two pages of his book with two wonderful pictures of the great street in Apamea after the erection, through the financing by the Osmane Mounif AIDI Foundation for Heritage, Culture and Sciences, of 400 of the 1200 columns which were lined up on the sides of the street, and he thanks Eng. Dr. Osmane Mounif AIDI describing his as an international personage.
The book is a trip through photos, by comparing new photographs with pictures taken in the beginnings of the last century. It includes unique pictures of Aleppo before four centuries (1689) and Al-Modiq citadel (1936), pictures of a bridge on the Orontes in Hama from the Ottoman era, and pictures of the souks in Damascus, Aleppo and Deir Ezzor.
Some of these photos were taken by Stevens himself, others are taken from the special collection of Osmane Mounif AIDI Foundation for Heritage, Culture and Sciences, and from other personal collections.
This book is a collection of art work which gives excitement and benefit.