Frazer Hay in conversation with HRH Princess Dana Firas, as part of 10 Stories for 10 Years.
On a sunny afternoon in Scotland, I spoke online with HRH Princess Dana Firas, who joined the conversation from Jordan. I had been nervous beforehand. Princess Dana’s reputation as one of the world’s leading voices for cultural heritage protection naturally carried a certain weight.
Yet within seconds of the conversation beginning, the nervousness disappeared.
She was warm, thoughtful, relaxed and quietly funny. There was no sense of distance or performance. Instead, there was attentiveness, openness and genuine curiosity. What followed felt less like a formal interview and more like an unusually reflective conversation about memory, identity, family, history and what cultural heritage really means in human terms.
Princess Dana is globally recognised for her work embedding heritage protection, sustainability and responsible tourism into international policy and public life. Her roles include UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador, President of the Petra National Trust, Chair of the International National Trusts Organisation (INTO), President of ICOMOS Jordan and numerous other leadership and advisory positions across the heritage sector. Her achievements and recognitions are extensive and international in scale.
Yet what struck me most was not the scale of the titles, but the intimacy of the memories she returned to repeatedly throughout the conversation.
‘Cultural heritage has been very much part of my upbringing since I was a child,’ she told me early on.
But she did not mean this in a formal sense. She meant it literally.
Jordan’s archaeological sites were simply part of everyday life. Before Petra became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1985, sites were less managed, less restricted and more organically woven into ordinary experience. Families visited them casually. Children explored them freely. They belonged to the landscape of growing up.
‘I literally grew up picnicking in and around archaeological sites,’ she explained.
One memory in particular stayed with me. Before Petra’s international designation changed how the site was managed, Princess Dana spent a night there under the stars as a teenager. She described sleeping on a small mattress in Petra itself, an experience she still considers one of the most extraordinary of her life.
What made the story especially striking was the honesty with which she described it. At the time, she and her friends had apparently complained throughout the drive there. Only afterwards did they realise what they had experienced.
‘I have these memories of literally being, living with these sites and with cultural heritage,’ she said.
That phrase felt important: living with them.
Heritage, in her childhood, was not a distant object to be admired. It was part of life itself.
She spoke warmly about growing up outdoors: hiking, walking, exploring forests and archaeological sites without necessarily distinguishing between them. Jordan, she explained, contains more than 100,000 archaeological sites and monuments across a relatively small country. Heritage is unavoidable there. It forms part of the physical and emotional geography of everyday existence.
When I asked if she had a favourite place as a child, she immediately mentioned Jerash.
‘Jerash is the largest Roman city outside of Italy,’ she said, smiling.
But again, what mattered was not only the monumentality of the site. What she remembered was the mixture of things surrounding it: nature, gardens, food, family outings and the excitement of visiting a small restaurant nearby.
‘It really is a mishmash of nature, archaeology and food.’
That word ‘mishmash’ stayed with me because it captured something central to the entire conversation. Heritage was never isolated from ordinary human experience. It was inseparable from memory, family, movement, laughter, smells, friendships and feelings.
Books also formed a major part of her childhood world. She described herself as an avid reader who lost herself in fiction and historical literature. When she spoke about reading The Little Prince as a young girl, she vividly remembered finishing the book in tears.
‘My favourite book ever is The Little Prince.’
There was something revealing in the way she recalled it: not performative emotion, but genuine memory still alive decades later.
Family, too, clearly sits at the centre of her worldview. Although she comes from a relatively small immediate family, she described growing up surrounded by a large extended Arab family network of aunts, uncles and cousins. When I asked what the word ‘home’ meant to her emotionally, she paused before answering with a memory she had never apparently articulated before.
‘It’s running out the door with friends and neighbours, jumping over each other’s walls, adventuring around the neighbourhood, putting on plays and forcing the parents to come and watch us.’
It was one of my favourite moments of the interview because it suddenly revealed the child behind the diplomat and international advocate: imaginative, energetic, sociable and creative.
In many ways, those childhood performances still echo in her work now. The impulse to communicate, connect, explain and bring people together remains central.
Her worldview expanded further when she travelled abroad. At only eleven years old, she spent three weeks in southern Norway, living with a fishing family and participating in an international camp with young people from around the world.
For an eleven-year-old, it was an extraordinarily formative experience.
‘It was the first time that I had this interaction with children my age from almost every corner of the world.’
She spoke about the anxiety of travelling alone at such a young age, but also the excitement of discovering that people from entirely different cultures could still share similar interests, humour and emotional experiences.
‘That really shaped my outlook very much.’
Later came university studies in the United States, where she studied international relations and economics during the dramatic geopolitical shifts surrounding the end of the Cold War. She described how studying abroad fundamentally altered her perspective on history, politics and identity.
‘When you first leave home, your history is from your own perspective,’ she explained. ‘Then suddenly you realise how others see the world.’
That widening of perspective clearly became foundational to the diplomatic and reflective approach she now brings to heritage work.
Her formal journey into cultural heritage protection began after returning to Jordan in her early twenties, when she took a position at the Royal Court in the office of Queen Noor, who at the time was patron of the Petra National Trust.
‘I learned a lot about diplomacy and work ethic from her,’ Princess Dana reflected.
She also spoke movingly about King Hussein, whom she described as her ‘compass in life,’ as well as the profound influence of her father, an engineer with a deeply ethical and principled worldview.
The thread connecting all these influences seemed remarkably consistent: integrity, responsibility, perspective and service.
As our conversation moved toward heritage protection itself, Princess Dana spoke with increasing philosophical depth. When I asked about the relationship between past, present and future, she rejected the idea that they could be separated at all.
‘I cannot look at the past, the present or the future separately,’ she said. ‘It’s just all connected.’
