Four years have passed since the start of the Photo Stories Evening, and our evenings are still crowned with the most beautiful and sweetest stories. In the Photo Stories Evening yesterday, March 23, which coincided with the fourth anniversary of the evening, the participants spread the fragrance of their stories with a beautiful literary and artistic sense.

The beginning was with Rahada Abdoush, who transported us with intense passion and wonderful narration through her story, in which she entered the depth of the image with historical projections on the city of Aleppo and her description of the sports clubs in it. Rahada adopted an informational density that took us with her for several generations, in a repeated dream with many characters and heroines, through which she was able to cross over all descriptions, so she surpassed nationalism and religion, roaming the neighborhoods of Aleppo.

Then came “The Memory of Rain” by the friend Bilal Al-Masry, as if the rain had a memory that held our hand and we lived with it for three periods of time, from 2020 to the eighties to 2010, and it was able to clearly reflect to us what the hero of the story was suffering from in terms of confusion and loss.

Despite the shock caused by the show, the accuracy in describing reality was necessary and essential for us to be able together to restore painful historical moments that closely resemble reality. Through this simulation, we can launch into valuable solutions and treatments that we need.

A strange contradiction narrated by Bilal, which captivated us, despite the great pain, until the end. His style was interesting and wonderful, mixing classical and colloquial Arabic, citing historical phrases that added vitality to the text.

But the elegance of the text and the smoothness of the beloved Egyptian dialect were clear in the story “Stranger” by Dr. Nabeel Arije, who excelled in his elegant literary and humorous sense, especially in his performance of his story from memory, to the point that we imagined that he was a narrator who had woven his story from his imagination.

But the truth is that it is a story documented on paper and documented in the mind of Dr. Nabil to present it to us with skill, recalling the unity between Syria and Egypt and after that the war in Lebanon. Perhaps the humor and beauty were in the heroine of the story, an eighty-year-old woman participating in the Games in Egypt, where the story narrates the suffering the heroine was subjected to and how her situation turned out.

"The Medal of Goodwill" was the last story with Saba Taama, as the story tells the story of a religiously committed family consisting of three girls. The story takes us through the alleys of Al-Salihiya neighborhood, accompanies us to the municipal stadium to reach the point where one of the girls falls in love with the Syrian world champion Alaa El Din Ne'mou. This character, who rebels against customs and traditions, and who added a touch of humor to the story, was enough to captivate us until the end, as we were faced with a story rich in historical information and its documentary narrative style.

And finally, the conclusion was sweet. After all these pleasant stories that come to mind, Mrs. Sabiha Jalb, the head of the Civil Cassation Court and the head of the Appeal Court in Idlib, who graduated in law and geography and worked as an administrator at Al-Khansa School in the sixties, and then moved to the judiciary in the seventies, told us. She was the first woman in Idlib to enter the judiciary.

Mrs. Sabiha was present with us this evening via an audio recording, to tell us in her voice the true story of the photo. As Mrs. Sabiha narrated, the photo was taken from Al-Khansa’a High School in Idlib in the second half of the sixties, where she was an administrator at the school. That period was a wide space for the intellectual liberation that was prevalent in Idlib at that time.

This liberation was clearly reflected in the periodic cultural and artistic activities that the school organized, which were rich with the participation of female students and their families on a wide scale, to the point that it did not encounter any objection except from a very small group. The young men and women of Idlib also played a major role in the University of Aleppo and its scientific and political leadership. This reflects to us the scientific movement and cultural and social activities that extended throughout the governorate, even in the countryside.