COTTBUS, GERMANY // With its buildings pulverised and reduced to skeletons, one of the world’s oldest cities, Aleppo, has been utterly devastated by the war in Syria.
Now, in Germany, scholars are preparing for its reconstruction one day by creating a super-detailed map of the old city and its treasures, long listed as a Unesco World Heritage site.
In a bright office of a university campus in Cottbus in the former East Germany, urban planner Christoph Wessling spreads a huge map across his desk. Measuring two by 2.5 metres and drawn to a scale of 1:500, it shows the labyrinth of alleys and streets of Aleppo, replicating the walled ancient city with its souqs, hammams, mosques, churches and residential dwellings, with infinite precision and loving detail.
In total, some 16,000 plots have been traced, as well as 400 floor plans of the main buildings of this city, which has been inhabited continuously for more than 6,000 years.
Aleppo was a city of hidden gems, recalled Mr Wessling, who was a frequent visitor to the northern Syrian metropolis before the start of the war in 2011.
“In Aleppo, we would enter a house whose austere facade was absolutely nothing special,” he said. “And then suddenly we came upon a chain of three enchanting inner courtyards with richly decorated pillars.”
The war divided Aleppo between rebels in the east and government loyalists in the west and set the scene for last year’s major humanitarian tragedy, before it was captured by the army of President Bashar al-Assad, backed by Russia and Iran.
In the coming weeks the map, created by six experts with a budget of 60,000 euros ($67,000), will be put online and made available to anyone wishing to participate in the eventual reconstruction of Aleppo.
The online map will feature “all the site plans, photos and descriptions of a given place”, according to the university, which is handling the project with the German foreign ministry and German Archaeological Institute.
The aim is to lay a foundation for the city to recover some of its old splendour — assuming construction companies can be prevented from simply bulldozing the ruins and replacing them with hotels and shopping malls.
Aleppo native Zeido Zeido, 29, a student in Cottbus who is preparing a doctoral thesis on his hometown, warns against excessive attention to the old city. Other districts with more recent architectural styles — which are not Unesco-rated — also require preservation, such as late 19th-century buildings from Aleppo’s time as one of the most important cities in the Ottoman Empire.
“There is no national heritage protection plan for the districts which are not classified by Unesco,” Mr Zeido said.
The challenge of reconstruction will be immense, say researchers at the Cottbus faculty of architecture. According to Unesco, about 60 per cent of the old city has been badly damaged and, of this area, 30 per cent totally destroyed.
In the souq, once one of the largest covered markets in the world, the stalls and wooden doors have been reduced to ashes.
The minaret of the famed Umayyad mosque collapsed four years ago, and the monumental Citadel has suffered “considerable damage” as have the caravan stops once used by Silk Road traders.
The Cottbus campus of the Technical University of Brandenburg was chosen to create the map because its architecture faculty has a long tradition of exchanges with its counterpart in Aleppo. Germany also has a wealth of experience in rebuilding cities, given the damage it suffered by bombing during the Second World War and the restoration of many urban centres after the reunification of East and West Germany in 1990.
But one thing Mr Zeido misses most is the sandy hue of Aleppo, “a city built with a peculiar stone that gave it a unique colour” And no map, however precise, can bring back to life.
* Agence France-Presse