By Hassan Al-Mahri ~
Heritage is not history— it’s a country’s soul, an eye over its heritage, identity, and culture which lived through millennia. In Yemen, a country renowned for its beautiful houses, that soul has been lost in the wrong manner. War, desertion, and centuries have left its mythical structures to ruin over the centuries, but eagle-eyed efforts fueled by grass-roots activism and movement worldwide are re-positioning Yemen on the architectural map.
Yemen architecture is just incredible. Shibam tower mudbricks, now officially the “Manhattan of the Desert,” and Sana’a old intricately decorated houses in the Old City are just so life-like replica of Yemen’s past and improved workmanship. These World Heritage sites by UNESCO are irreplacable more than the numbers itself; they tell more about Yemen’s past—a past constructed by powerful waves of trade, cross-cultural contact, and artistry depiction of the Yemeni.
But decades of war and mass emigration had depleted them. Disuse, earthquake damage, and neglect have hastened their fall. Amidst all this suffering, local activists have rescued them. Citizens, architects, and historians are their vocal defenders, who would want to save them so that they could leave behind for another generation a sense of pride and identity.
Sheila, being a professional architect and passionate keeper of the cultural heritage, is the one who coaches the next generation to learn the traditional method of construction by practicing it and learning it through workshops. She makes sure the method of conservation of such buildings doesn’t get lost but is passed on to the next generation. Besides grass-root movements, there is another historian named Ahmed who also provides services to global institutions up to the point of mobilizing funds required and linking grass-root proposals to global donors.
The foreign NGOs have also made a huge contribution in the manner in which they were providing economic assistance as well as technical assistance to aid the community initiatives. Sustainable tourism has also been established in most of such initiatives in which the tourists were being motivated to visit and see the architectural wonder of Yemen and remit back earnings to the locals. It is heading in a sustainable path by which economic opportunity is being paired with conservation of heritage.
Yemen’s restoration is one that is international in scope outside Yemen proper. It has been researched and it has been determined that the conservation of heritage promotes social solidarity and collective resilience—the same pillars of any society in crisis. With all these building blocks aligned, Yemen’s monuments are reborn anew from brittle foundations to resilient symbols of continuity and hope.
In fact, Yemen’s fixation on finding out about its heritage is a polite respect for the intractable people’s character. And with yesterday’s guardians of theirs to be instructors of tomorrow at the helm, they build such monuments timeless ones to all eternity.
References & Further Reading
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Old City of Sana’a
- UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Shibam, Hadramawt
- Yemen’s Architectural Heritage at Risk
- Conservation Efforts in Yemen
- Sustainable Tourism and Heritage Conservation: UNWTO Report
