an amazing middle east image repository

I recently discovered (via the H-Turk list) this wonderful treasure trove of historical images from the Middle East--postcards, photographs, artwork, documents, and more, dating back to the 1860s. They come from the collection of a Syrian-American doctor, whose Canadian nephew has constructed this searchable web resource to display them. The images are just stunning; mostly from Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt and from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries--so very many are from places I've been and periods I study. Better yet, they're accompanied by good historical captions, and the website is beautifully designed and searchable by topic and interactive map. If you are a geeky historian like me, beware, this will absorb you for hours. But it will be time well spent.

Go see the reading of General Allenby's proclamation in Jerusalem, the norias of Hama, Kurdish Jews of Northern Iraq, a hamam in Bursa, and a shrine in Samara. Also the Saidnaya convent (this, dear S, is where your starry Madonna is from), and the Ottoman sultan arriving by boat for Friday prayers at Ortaköy camii on the Bosphorus, where a century and a half later we go to eat kumpir on my birthday. And here is Antioch on the cusp of becoming Antakya--this photo should have been in the images appendix of my thesis. The image below is my favorite: it's the sign of a shopkeeper in the US (here in Brooklyn, perhaps?) in 1908, selling all his goods because he's returning home to Damascus on account of the Young Turk revolution and the reinstatement of the 1876 Ottoman constitution.