The National, January 2, 2010
“The moment I found these, my life changed,” says Sharif Sharif-Safadi, archaeologist and expert on the cultural heritage of Nazareth.
It was 1986. Dr. Sharif-Safadi had just returned from Italy. He’d studied archaeology in Perugia and worked on the conservation of historic items in Rome. And then, one afternoon in his hometown of Nazareth, he looked up and saw an Ottoman Era ceiling painting.
“I was shocked. I was moved.” The historical treasure above him, he says, was as significant as anything he saw in Europe.
Though the dozens of paintings scattered through Nazareth, Israel’s largest Arab majority city, were not well-known to locals, a friend told Sharif-Safadi that there were more. He scrapped the idea of studying overseas and began documenting the ceiling paintings in earnest in 1987, walking from house to house in the Old City, a camera ready in hand. His efforts culminated in a book, Wall and Ceiling Paintings in Notable Palestinian Mansions in the Late Ottoman Period: 1856-1917, published in 2008.
The ceiling paintings tell stories of the wealthy Arab families who built grand mansions in the twilight of the Ottoman Empire. In 1858 changes in property laws allowed people to register their lands and sprawling houses sprung up throughout the city. The architecture was wholly Middle Eastern: large, airy courtyards, stone exteriors, vaulted arches, and domed windows. Furniture was uncommon so interior walls included niches and rooms were multi-purpose.
Though their homes were traditional, the wealthy weren’t provincial. The rich were open-minded and curious about the outside world and a new field, photography, exposed them to images of the West. As the upper crust of Palestine turned their eyes towards the lands north of the Mediterranean, their homes took on European flourishes, such as ceiling paintings.
A Lebanese artist, Salib Yohanna, did the majority, tailoring each to the family they were created for. Yohanna employed the secco technique, which is similar to fresco, and used colors derived from minerals mixed with egg. The payment Yohanna is rumored to have received for each completed piece—one gold pound and a bottle of arak—seems wildly out of proportion with the rich legacy he left behind. Each ceiling painting, Sharif-Safadi explains, tells us something about the individual’s life and that of the collective in Palestine.
Yohanna decorated the homes of Christians who made their money in agriculture, for example, with images of angels and wheat. Panels in a wealthy trader’s home show the owner traveling to the pyramids in Egypt and include depictions of ports in Istanbul, Akko, Jaffa and Haifa. The images of Haifa include a Muslim neighborhood that was destroyed in 1948, when the state of Israel was established.
“They’re living history,” Sharif-Safadi comments.
But many have disappeared. Sharif-Safadi estimates that prior to the founding of the Jewish state, 100 ceiling paintings could be found in Palestine. Today only about 60 remain, with the majority in and around Nazareth.
Unlike other areas of Palestine, much of Nazareth’s Arab population stayed put in 1948. The wealthy that remained are proud of the ceiling paintings and are careful to preserve both Yohanna’s artistry and the family stories that accompany it.
It was oral history that brought Sharif-Safadi to Yohanna’s name. When Sharif-Safadi began documenting the paintings, an elderly man living in one of the mansions recalled his father, after an earthquake damaged their ceiling in 1927, exclaiming “Where is Salib to fix this?!” Sharif-Safadi later spied a panel in another mansion bearing a small inscription in Arabic: Salib Yohanna.
The Fahoum house is adjacent to the Old City’s White Mosque, which the family has owned since it was built in the early 1800s. The Fahoums are currently building a new home in wealthy Upper Nazareth, which is inhabited mostly by Jewish Israelis, continuing the negative population growth that has emptied the Old City over the past fifty years.
Despite her parent’s intentions to move, 20-year-old Kholoud Fahoum, who studies dentistry in Jordan, wants to stay. She points towards the doorway and says that her father’s cousin, who died fighting in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, lived in the neighboring house. “Leaving here is to leave our memory,” she remarks. She is equally attached to the overhead adornments—bursts of red and pink roses are set against sky blue and edged by flowered swags—that grace the salon.
Fauzi Azar Inn, once the dwelling of the Azar family, boasts two colorfully decorated ceilings. In the salon—which includes Turkish marble floors and the three arched windows that were typical of Ottoman Era mansions in Palestine—angels flit overhead. One grasps a sickle while the other holds wheat, reminding the viewer that the Azars made their money in the agricultural trade. Green vases overflow with blossoming flowers, alluding to the earth’s abundance.
In the adjoining room, statuary urns display clusters of blooms. Azure accents contrast crisply with the sunny yellow backdrop.
While half of the Azars left for Syria in 1948, the others stayed behind to protect the home. In 1980, a fire threatened the house and Fauzi Azar died as he fought the flames. The ceiling paintings bear marks from the episode.
But many of the Ottoman Era mansions have not had such passionate caretakers.
The El-Rais house, for example, was left empty in 1948 when the owner fled to Lebanon. The Israeli government considered it “abandoned property” and appropriated the building. Today, the three-story mansion—which includes 13 ceiling paintings—is divided into five low income apartments.
A married mother of three who makes her home in El-Rais says that she understands the significance of the ceiling paintings. A ray of light shines down on Jesus, who feeds a crowd of men from a handful of baskets; a wealthy man lunches with his wife outside their country home; four soaring eagles, wings outstretched, protect the home; and the eye of God, flanked by two very human angels, watches over all.
She glances up at the scenes above; her face is expressionless. “To me, it’s not important,” she says, adding that she is uncomfortable with the decorations because they seem more appropriate for the religious or wealthy. She and her husband are both internally displaced persons—Palestinian refugees who live within Israel. Their financial situation is precarious, their legal status could change—she is more concerned with her family’s survival than art and history.
This sentiment was common in the early days of the state when both newcomers to Israel and Palestinian refugees put a fresh coat of paint over Yohanna’s work. And in some cases, Sharif-Safadi acknowledges, Jews covered the ceilings in an attempt to whitewash the country’s past.
But today, a growing number of Israeli tourists are coming to Nazareth to see the Arab mansions adorned by a Lebanese artist.
“There’s a shift towards conservation,” Sharif-Safadi says. “It’s a shift towards acknowledging the Palestinian narrative. [Israelis] are starting to see the city as a whole, the culture as a whole.”