Daly Conservation

Being a student in Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation (WUDPAC) I learned and participated in the Iraq Cultural Heritage Project (ICHP). I first learned about the project from my professors who were directly involved. The program was involved in creating a school for conservation in Erbil, northern Iraq, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan and one of the oldest continually inhabited cities.
I knew very little about the region, so I began reading about the history of the Kurdish people and their ongoing struggle for independence by the Kurds in Iraq, Turkey, Syria, Iran, Afganistan, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. It is not a happy history, scrolling through centuries of conflict and struggles that continue until today. As well as open conflict the kurds are culturally oppressed, in some counties they cannot use their kurdish names, celebrate kurdish holidays, and they are discouraged from speaking kurdish.

The Iraqi Kurdistan region is beautiful, There is a series of photographs by Ed Kashi that show Kurds in daily activities.

See http://mediastorm.org/0011.htm

The plan is to build a conservation school and library in Erbil where conservators from throughout Iraq can come for training. There will also be training for museum directors and collection management staff. The museums in Iraq will be satellite museums to the main museum in Baghdad, using the national collection. The director of the project is Jessie Johnson and she is blogging about her experience as an American expat living in Erbil at http://roundthing.wordpress.com/ . I like this project because it is helping Iraqi citizens take better care of their cultural heritage. It is a good thing to do and it is an exciting opportunity to help the country.