A guardian of Syria's imperiled cultural heritage

Almost a decade has gone by since the first group of postgraduate students from the University of Damascus came under the guidance of Greek scientists from the European Center of Byzantine and Post-Byzantine Monuments (EKBMM) in Thessaloniki to study and document splendid mosaic floors from the Early Christian period at the Syrian capital's National Museum.

The study of the Syrian mosaics was one of the first training programs in the Middle Eastern country run by EKBMM, which took on the painstaking task of documenting hundreds of slabs of relocated mosaics with Greek inscriptions using advanced scientific methods.

At the time, the field of mosaic conservation and documentation was still very much in a nascent phase both at the University of Damascus and at Syria's museums, and digital archiving - made possible thanks to the donation of electronic equipment by EKBMM -...