Frazer Hay in conversation with Eshraq Al-Abrash, as part of 10 Stories for 10 Years.
We met on Kennington Road on a cold March evening, just as the light was beginning to fade. No grand museum, no archive, no formal backdrop. Just a conversation, and a story that carried its own weight.
Eshraq Al-Abrash is 30 years old. In another context, she might be described simply as a student, an international trainee at the City & Guilds of London Art School, specialising in architectural stone carving. She is currently supported through a scholarship coordinated by the World Monuments Fund, with support from the Cultural Protection Fund.
But that description, while accurate, barely begins to explain how she got here.
Her name, she tells me, means ‘sunrise’ or ‘sunshine.’
It feels appropriate.
Eshraq grew up in Homs, in what she describes as a ‘vertical family.’ A four-storey building filled with relatives (cousins, aunts, uncles), around thirty or more people living together, sharing daily life.
‘It was a great adventure,’ she says.
Her memories are not of conflict, at least not at first. They are of balconies at sunset, of sitting together in the evenings, of plants (orange, lemon, olive) growing in and around the building. Of streets where people planted trees and knew one another. Of a city built in black stone, where mosques, churches and homes carried a quiet, material beauty she did not yet know she would one day return to.
‘I loved the balcony,’ she tells me. ‘It was warm. Cosy.’
It is a simple description, but it carries something important: a sense of place that is both physical and emotional. A place not yet broken.
She was the eldest of five children. Family mattered deeply. It still does.
Her father, a central figure in her life, had been imprisoned for eleven years in the 1980s because of his opposition to the Assad regime. By the time Eshraq was a child, that experience had become part of the family’s internal world, something spoken about carefully, quietly, and never outside the home.
‘People used to say the walls can hear you,’ she recalls.
As a child, she sat beside her father watching the news, listening to stories of prison, of politics, of resistance. It was too much, really, for someone so young, but it shaped her. For a time, she imagined a future in politics, a continuation of something her father had begun.
He was proud of that.
When the war came, everything shifted.
At sixteen, she and her family left Homs. Not gradually, not by choice, but abruptly, leaving behind relatives, friends, home, and the life she had known. The extended family dispersed. The building emptied. The ‘vertical family’ collapsed into distance.
‘It was a shock,’ she says simply.
They moved first to Yabroud, in the Damascus countryside, then later, as the violence spread, onward again. What followed were years she describes as ‘the ugliest’ of her life: displacement, uncertainty, loss, fear, and the slow erosion of what had once felt stable.
There were airstrikes. Siege conditions. Hunger. Cold.
There was also something harder to describe, the gradual change of a person under those conditions.
‘You change,’ she says. ‘In all aspects.’
Beliefs shift. Certainties dissolve. Relationships strain and reform. Identity itself becomes unstable.
Eventually, she and her family crossed into Lebanon, illegally, by truck, arriving in Tripoli with little more than the clothes they carried.
There, for the first time in years, she felt something like safety.
‘I love Tripoli,’ she says, and means it.
She stayed for several years. Studied business administration on a scholarship, not by choice, but because it was what was available. Graduated without formal certification due to her status as a Syrian refugee.
And then she became a teacher.
For six years, she helped educate Syrian refugee children. It was stable, meaningful work. It mattered. Her father approved.
But something in her was unsettled.
The shift came, unexpectedly, during COVID.
Like many others, she found herself at home, work disrupted, life paused. It was then that a friend mentioned a training programme in stone carving, a project led by the World Monuments Fund in Tripoli.
‘I had never heard of stone carving before,’ she says.
It was unusual, especially for women. Most training programmes offered more conventional skills. This was different: physical, technical, tied to architecture and heritage.
She put her name down.
That small decision changed everything.
The training brought together Syrian refugees and Lebanese participants. Forty students in total. Only a handful were women.
From the beginning, it was difficult.
The work was physical. The environment male-dominated. Dust, noise, resistance, both from the material and from expectation.
‘I didn’t feel I belonged,’ she says.
There were moments she wanted to leave.
But she stayed.
