Reviving Mosul: Heritage Recovery as Peacebuilding

Frazer Macdonald Hay
1 day ago
5 min read

In the heart of Mosul’s war-torn old city, stones speak. Cracked domes, scorched courtyards, and looted convents carry more than dust and damage—they carry memories, and with them, possibilities. From 2020-23, I was honoured to contribute to one of the city’s most significant international recovery efforts: the ICCROM–UNESCO Capacity Building Programme for heritage professionals, delivered under the flagship initiative Revive the Spirit of Mosul.

My role centred on the programme, titled Capacity Building for Holistic, Sustainable and Resilient Recovery of Urban Heritage in Mosul. Working alongside colleagues from UNESCO and ICCROM, I helped develop and deliver training sessions on post-conflict recovery planning, recovery monitoring, peacebuilding, funding applications and the adaptive reuse of culturally significant buildings. These sessions were crafted not as technical lectures alone, but as tools for reflection, ways of empowering heritage practitioners to become agents of long-term civic healing.

Why Heritage Recovery Matters

The destruction of cultural heritage is never just collateral—it is often intentional. In Mosul, as in many post-conflict cities, heritage has been targeted not only for its material value but for its symbolic role in identity, cohesion, and public memory. In this context, recovery must do more than restore facades. It must address the human, social, and spatial dimensions of violence.

My part of the programme was designed with this in mind. Its objectives were to:

Introduce participants to core theories and practices of heritage management and conservation
Equip professionals with the skills to plan and implement holistic recovery processes
Foster understanding of stakeholder dynamics and how to communicate the values of a project
Build technical capacity for working on high-significance sites in Mosul, including those involved in UNESCO and related initiatives

All modules were context-sensitive—framed not just at the level of site or city, but within global, national, neighbourhood, and personal scales. In doing so, we recognised that heritage recovery is never isolated from questions of identity, politics, social repair, and memory.

Curriculum Highlights: From Theory to Practice

This part of the programme addressed a wide range of interdisciplinary subjects. Among the most critical were:

Assessment of cultural significance, including contested meanings and multiple narratives
Documentation and damage assessment in complex urban sites
Community dialogue and stakeholder negotiation
Team-building, project planning, implementation and evaluation
Hybrid reuse strategies, combining tradition with innovation
Peacebuilding principles, including how heritage work can contribute to reconciliation
Narrative-building and modes of memorialisation, from cosmopolitan to agonistic
Managing media, spoilers, and public expectation in fragile environments

Each topic was grounded in real-world case studies, including both successful interventions and complex failures. Our approach encouraged reflection on unexpected potentials, unforeseen pitfalls, and the need for humility and listening in every step of post-conflict practice.

Case in Focus: Our Lady of the Hour (Al-Saa’a) Church

One of the most poignant elements of the training was our narrative-building work around the Prayer House of Our Lady of the Hour, known locally as Al-Saa’a Church. This Latin Catholic church is more than a site of worship—it is a palimpsest of Mosul’s religious, cultural, and intellectual history.

Founded in 1870 by the Dominican order as part of the first pontifical mission to Mesopotamia, the church was part of a much larger complex that included a seminary, schools for boys and girls, a hospital, a women teachers’ training school, and accommodation for mission staff. From the beginning, the site embodied three interlinked dimensions: religious, cultural, and social.

Its role in Mosul’s intellectual life was equally significant. Lacking teaching materials, the Dominicans established Mesopotamia’s first printing press within the convent. From this press came not only the first Bible in Arabic but also the first Kurdish grammar book, along with a host of other locally relevant texts. This act—of knowledge creation rather than knowledge import—stands as a rare and early example of context-driven educational development.

Perhaps most famously, in 1880, the church’s bell tower was erected with funds from Empress Eugénie of France, wife of Napoleon III. It was the first bell tower in Iraq, housing the now-iconic four-dial clock, whose chimes became a familiar rhythm for Moslawis across generations. The surrounding neighbourhood took its name from the clock itself: Al-Saa’a, or “the hour.”

This site was heavily damaged during the occupation of Mosul by Daesh, and its convent was looted and desecrated. But the structure endures, and the recent rehabilitation by UNESCO and ALIPH offers an opening not only for physical restoration, but for public re-engagement with a plural, interwoven past.

In our training, we worked closely with this site, identifying layered components for reuse and storytelling:

The Olive Garden, symbolising peace and rootedness
The Old Chapel, carefully restored and reactivated
The Main Courtyard, a potential civic gathering space
The Main Chapel, whose scars and grandeur speak equally
The South Courtyard, offering opportunities for education, reflection, and community ownership

Participants were asked not only to design adaptive reuse strategies, but to craft narratives of recovery that speak to the site’s religious significance, colonial entanglements, gender histories, and civic potential. What emerged was a shared understanding that memory work and place-making must go hand in hand—that to rehabilitate a building is also to rehabilitate a social and symbolic landscape.

Conclusion: More Than Stones—Heritage as Peace Work

The work in Mosul—training participants, crafting curriculum, and engaging with the built remnants of a shattered city—was not just technical; it was deeply human. Through capacity-building, we sought to equip local professionals with tools, yes—but also with questions, methods of listening, and frameworks for ethical imagination.

The Our Lady of the Hour Church—Al-Saa’a—stood as both symbol and challenge. In its layered history of religious missions, printing presses, gendered education, colonial connections, and urban rhythms, it offered a potent reminder: a heritage site is never one story. It is an accumulation, a provocation, a memory palace—and, in post-conflict contexts, often a wound.

What we do with such places matters. To restore a bell tower is not just to reconstruct architecture, but to rebuild the auditory presence of civic life. To plant olive trees in a once-violent courtyard is to inscribe new meanings onto old ground. Through adaptive reuse, participatory planning, and narrative layering, we help communities articulate not only what they have lost, but also what they still wish to become.

Heritage recovery, in this view, is a form of peacebuilding. It invites us to resist erasure, to reimagine civic possibility, and to negotiate the uneasy coexistence of grief and hope. In Mosul, these are not abstract ideas—they are embedded in stone and soil, and in the lives of those who returned to rebuild.

As professionals, we are called not only to restore structures, but to hold space for plurality, ambiguity, and co-authorship. In doing so, we may help ensure that recovery is not simply reconstruction, but reconciliation—a layered and local act of remembering forward.

References & Further Reading

ICCROM & UNESCO (2024). Capacity Building for Holistic, Sustainable and Resilient Recovery of Urban Heritage in Mosul. Full Training Guide
UNESCO & ALIPH. Rehabilitation of Our Lady of the Hour Church in Mosul
British Academy. Preserving the Disappearing Cultural Heritage of Post-War Mosul