Syria Today | Guarding the Stars

One family's struggle to protect a cultural relic while grappling with political turmoil.

By Sarah Abu Assali
Photo Adel Samara

Jassem Huweish, in his forties, looks a lot like the one-thousand-year-old castle he guards: powerful, keen, and still standing. A survivor of the Tishreen Lake floods that submerged his village more than 10 years ago, Jassem is now sceptical about his prospects of surviving the crisis storming the country. Politics have taken their toll on everyone, and this father of five, who until recently made a living from tourism, is no exception.

Before the unrest, the Najem Castle guard wished to have proper electricity and regular supplies of drinking water, the establishment of a tourist facility by the lake, and the improvement of the main road leading to the castle. Nowadays, all Jassem dreams of is an ending to the stalemate "as soon as possible".

Blast from the past
Politics have affected thousands of people like Jassem living in north-eastern Syria. The fight over the water of the Euphrates among Turkey, Syria and Iraq has driven Syria to build three dams in three decades: the Euphrates, Ba'ath, and Tishreen, each with an artificial lake behind it. As a result, hundreds of villages were flooded, thousands of families displaced and the rich socio-cultural heritage of the area diminished. However, these dams were considered by the late president, Hafez al-Assad, to be a "means for boosting our economy and a tool for a basic change in our social life."

The Tishreen dam, 75 km from the Syrian-Turkish border, was constructed over the Euphrates River in the northern Syrian hills in 1998-1999. In the process, lands surrounding Tishreen Lake, 125 km from Aleppo, were seized by the government, while their owners were offered smaller lands and construction materials to build new properties elsewhere. Families who were reluctant to leave and who ignored eviction warnings saw their houses demolished by the army in 2000.

Throughout its history, the Euphrates and its dams have long been a touchstone for Syrian writers and filmmakers. The late Syrian filmmaker Omar Amiralay first perceived dam-building on the Euphrates as a great achievement and made the documentary "Attempt at the Euphrates Dam" about it. 33 years later, he came to believe that beyond the generation of hydroelectric power, political motives were involved in the project. In 2004, he made a second film about the same dam, "Flood in Ba'ath Country". It suggests that more catastrophic than the flood itself was an ideology which prevented people from thinking critically. The film sparked a huge controversy and was banned in Syria.

2011- The Huweish family are the only people who still live inside the lake campus guarding the castle. Jassem's son does not want to follow his father's lead in guarding the castle. "My nephew who is not so good at school would take up the job. My son is smart, he speaks English!" Jassem explained.

Syrian filmmaker Mohamed al-Roumi also shot a film, "Blue-Grey", dedicated to the 113 archaeological hills and 52 villages, including the Najem Castle village, that were to be submerged in 1999, in homage to a "splendour that is doomed to vanish forever".

Jassem's old house appears in this documentary. Nowadays, his family is the only remnant of the inundated village. Together with his mother, his brother's family and their 11 children, Jassem lives inside the lake campus, guarding the huge fortress which overlooks the calm waters of the great Euphrates.

Left stranded

2011- Remnants of the Najem Castle village after floods and evacuation.

The vulnerable and drought-affected North-East has only recently seen development projects to provide irrigation, agriculture, and basic infrastructure. Used to life in harsh circumstances, Jassem was reluctant to speak about how things had deteriorated. But the times that followed the floods were sad ones for his family. Besides losing their lands, houses and community, they were also banned from farming or herding inside the land appropriated by state, and were thus forced to search for a new source of income.

After over a decade, things started to look more promising. The castle became a main tourist attraction and site for archaeological expeditions. Visiting tourists found Jassem's house sheltering and hospitable, as he offered them home-made food and guided tours in the area, in exchange for however much money they felt his services were worth. These contributions considerably raised the income of his family, which had previously found it impossible to subsist on his monthly state salary of around 10,000 SYP (USD 200).

Furthermore, in 2010, a Turkish-Syrian initiative was proposed to restore the castle and establish the biggest museum in the area. These plans, had they been implemented, would have encouraged more expedition groups and tourists to visit, and "we would have had a more prosperous life," Jassem explained. But the project was suspended until further notice.

Meanwhile, to surmount the shortage of government investment in local tourism, Jassem and his brother embarked on their own version of a motel. By late last year they had built two big rooms to host visitors. But this March, "people just stopped coming," Jassem said. "Recently, I've been receiving one or two guests per month in the best cases. We do not know what is going to happen next."

Women in the family used to make colourful embroideries and woollen carpets which they sold to tourists. Now these handicrafts lie in heaps covered with plastic bags left to grow dusty. "I've stopped doing [embroideries] a long time ago…There's no one to buy what I already have," Jassem's wife lamented.

Weathering the crisis
To provide basic staples, Jassem illegally maintains a couple of cows and several olive trees near his house. He irrigates the trees with water from the lake, using a small electric pump. Ironically, 40 villages surrounding the artificial lake remain water-deprived because the project intended to supply them with water has not yet been implemented.

Nor does Jassem's family have access to drinking-water. In the winter they can use lake water, but in summer, because of heat and insects, the water becomes unclean and they have to use manual filtration methods to procure drinking water. Since there is no electricity where they live, they use the electricity cables designated for lighting the castle.

Their situation recalls the novel "The Submerged" by Syrian writer Abdul Salam al-Ujeili, which portrays dam-building on the Euphrates as a human-made disaster. According to the novel, the real catastrophe is that chronic injustice becomes the norm for the "submerged" people, who are aggrieved, but accept everything as it is.

Although deeply affected by the crisis, Jassem is not involved in politics at all. Every evening he watches news on the Syrian Satellite Channel and refuses to watch "malicious [TV] channels". However, he has not seen or heard of any violence in his surroundings.

"I don't even know what is happening out there; we just know that there are no tourists," he explained. "Every time I go to Aleppo to get my pay check, I look around to see what is happening, but I really haven't seen anything here in this area."

1999- a family from the Najem Castle village leaving their home after the state demolished it for being inside the lake campus.

Nevertheless, Jassem seems to be proud of his 7-year-old son Firas, who wants to become a member of the security forces. "He has a passion for chasing armed groups," Jassem said.

Waiting to see what the future will bring, all Jassem knows for sure is that he wants his old life back. "We wish for the situation to get better, to have tourism back, and to see the agreements aimed at restoring and boosting the touristic significance of the castle being put into effect," he declared.