Berlin 2015: IG: @sonatatoyan When I was a kid those summers of the late 1980's early 90's in #Aleppo#Syria, one of my favorite memories was watching my maternal grandmother make rose jam on the balcony of the family home in Sulemaniyeh ... It was a long process, several days of mixing the petals with sugar in a large metal pan covered with gauze, allowing the sun to perform her alchemy .... I thought it fantastic that we were eating flowers and was impatient to receive the fresh batches that would be had with home made pita bread and ropes of Armenian string cheese and watermelon on late summer nights ...
My Marie nene would spend the entire three months of our stay making more and more of this divine jam for us to take back in freezer bags to the States. We would return with suitcases full of preserves of all kinds: walnut, fig, sour cherry and rose to enjoy back in the States, all while maintaining our little Aleppo within the four walls of our American home ...
My grandmother died 3 years ago in the Aleppo she refused to leave ... This morning I walked into the kitchen where my mother was making a Middle-Eastern breakfast for me ... toasting sesame seeds to add to the za'aatar that we had brought from Aleppo years ago, and she uncovers the very last batch of rose jam that my Marie nene made and the smell brought both of us to a flood of tears ...
The world now knows Syria through images of destruction, chaos and horror ... For me, I will keep the tender taste of roses and love and family and community as the definition of a land, a people and a time that I will never be able to return ... in deep gratitude for the ways in which it shaped me ... for the layers and layers of the magic ...
and no matter what, this I will always have and keep ...
My Marie nene would spend the entire three months of our stay making more and more of this divine jam for us to take back in freezer bags to the States. We would return with suitcases full of preserves of all kinds: walnut, fig, sour cherry and rose to enjoy back in the States, all while maintaining our little Aleppo within the four walls of our American home ...
My grandmother died 3 years ago in the Aleppo she refused to leave ... This morning I walked into the kitchen where my mother was making a Middle-Eastern breakfast for me ... toasting sesame seeds to add to the za'aatar that we had brought from Aleppo years ago, and she uncovers the very last batch of rose jam that my Marie nene made and the smell brought both of us to a flood of tears ...
The world now knows Syria through images of destruction, chaos and horror ... For me, I will keep the tender taste of roses and love and family and community as the definition of a land, a people and a time that I will never be able to return ... in deep gratitude for the ways in which it shaped me ... for the layers and layers of the magic ...
and no matter what, this I will always have and keep ...
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