International affairs

The extra­or­di­nary sto­ry of how the besieged Syr­i­an town of Daraya found hope and inspi­ra­tion in a secret under­ground library. Daraya lies on the fringe of Dam­as­cus, just south west of the Syr­i­an Cap­i­tal. Yet it lives in anoth­er world. Besieged by Syr­i­an gov­ern­ment forces since 2011, its peo­ple were deprived of food, bom­bard­ed by bombs and mis­siles, and shot at by snipers. Its build­ings lay in ruins; office build­ings, shops and fam­i­ly homes shat­tered by the con­stant shelling from gov­ern­ment forces. But deep beneath this scene of fright­en­ing dev­as­ta­tion lay a secret library. No signs marked its pres­ence. While the streets above echoed with rifle fire and shelling, the secret world below was a haven of peace and tran­quil­li­ty. Books, long rows of them, lined almost every wall. Bloat­ed vol­umes with grand leather cov­ers. Tat­tered old tomes with bare­ly read­able spines. Pock­et sized guides to Syr­i­an poet­ry. Reli­gious works with gaudy gold-let­ter­ing and no-non­sense ref­er­ence books, all arranged in well-ordered lines. But this pre­cious horde of books was not bought from pub­lish­ers, book ware­hous­es, or loaned by oth­er libraries. Many peo­ple had risked their lives to save books from the dev­as­ta­tion of war. Because to them, the secret library was a sym­bol of hope — of their deter­mi­na­tion to lead a mean­ing­ful exis­tence and to rebuild their frac­tured soci­ety. This is the sto­ry of an extra­or­di­nary place and the peo­ple who made it hap­pen. It is also a book about human resilience and val­ues. And through it all is thread­ed the very won­der­ful, uni­ver­sal love for books and the hope they can bring.