Editor’s Note: The city of Aleppo has suffered incredible destruction over the course of the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011 and is ongoing. The conflict led to the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Aleppo residents, tens of thousands of casualties, and the devastation of the majority of the city’s buildings and cultural sites. With the recent fall of the Assad regime in late 2024, many refugees have begun returning to cities across Syria with hopes of rebuilding what was lost, including Aleppo’s old market, Souq Madina, a collection of over 30 souqs in Aleppo. The souq reopened in fall 2024 as the result of the community’s passion and hard work to restore this essential gathering space.

Guest author Ali Esmaiel, International Management and Communication Consultant and former CEO for Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Syria, ruminates on what it took to rebuild the souq and what the market’s reopening has meant for residents.

Ali will join us virtually at our upcoming International Public Markets Conference in Milwaukee on Friday, June 13th, 2025, to share his insights during the panel discussion, “Balancing Tradition and Transformation: Meeting the Moment While Celebrating the Cultural Legacy of Historic Markets.” 

Prologue: The Place That Wouldn’t Quit

Aleppo’s old market is older than many countries, dating as far back as the 14th century. It’s sprawling, layered, and impossible to describe fully. It survived the Mongols, the Ottomans, the French, fire, and famine. But the war of the 2010s almost broke it. Vaults crumbled, flames chewed through timber that had seen half a millennium, and alleys once thick with life became shadows.

The souq was never just a bazaar. It was the city’s psyche, a living organism with a memory longer than any war. Before the bombing, you could lose yourself in the bazaar for hours: hearing the slap of sandals, witnessing the sun teasing brass pots, smelling the thick air stitched with cumin and sweet soap, and watching kids playfully dart between columns of light and dust. Both arguments and laughter could be overheard at once. Outside, the world spun and threatened, but inside life carried on for centuries.

And then, for a few impossible years, it didn’t.

War flatlined the market’s pulse. The souq’s silence was a kind of death—but also, quietly, a waiting. The bazaar is now returning to life, which offers a valuable moment of reflection: what has the souq meant, what does it continue to mean, and what can we learn from the experience of rebuilding?

The Grit and Art of Rebirth

UNESCO recognized the market’s cultural value by designating it a World Heritage Site several decades ago. While the souq has long been known to play a much bigger role than a place of trade and commerce, it took war and mass destruction for the world to begin paying closer attention.

In the process of picking up the pieces of the souq, we found more than rubble; we found stories. 

Khaled, a fifth-generation stonemason, wept when he first returned to the souq: “My father taught me to listen to stone. He’d scold me if my chisel rang too bright.”

The team that began to rebuild the market had many disagreements about the best approach to take. Should we smooth over fire-blackened arches, or let them stand as scars? In the end, most agreed with Bakri, the spice merchant, who said:

“Let the stones remember."

So we did. We salvaged what we could wherever we could, and we learned humility where we couldn’t. Some days, it felt like the market was guiding us, not the other way around.

The day the shutters of the souq lifted post-restoration, Fatima, a soap vendor with her turquoise headscarf vivid against the dust, led a group through the renewed old alleys.

“When I heard the shutters roll, I cried. My mother sold soap here, I bought my wedding dress here. Now my granddaughter plays in the same aisle.”

Bakri, once the jokester of the spice row, lost his shop for four years. When he finally turned the key again, he stood inside a long time before putting his scale on the counter. “I forgot how heavy saffron smells,” he joked, blinking back tears. The children—some had never seen the market alive—ran wild, chasing their own first memories.

Markets as Social Glue

Aleppo’s market is an ecosystem, not a spreadsheet. With over 380 shops now humming, a lattice of jobs—porters, bakers, tailors, guides—the market undoubtedly plays an important economic role to the community. But the true currency is trust. The first post-restoration bargains were more about hope than money.

One returning vendor summed it up:

“The market’s back, so maybe, just maybe, the city is too.”

Economic data is patchy, but intangible value—renewed social bonds, dignified return, belonging—is off the charts.

The souq’s rebirth would have been impossible without a strong coalition. Aga Khan Trust for Culture, UNESCO, local authorities—all pushed and pulled. International sanctions on Syria made procurement a riddle. City politics lurched and stalled. At one meeting, a weary city official grinned through exhaustion:

“This is not just international money. It’s our hands. Our future.”

Not every partnership was smooth. Ownership was hard-won—restoration led by those who lost the most, not just the loudest in donor meetings. We all learned the difference between saving buildings and saving the meaning of buildings.

Obstacles, Imperfections, and the Long Road 

Let’s not kid ourselves. There are scars no mason can hide. Some families never returned. Some shops opened, then closed again. Conservation plans still run on hope and improvisation. But the market is alive—no longer a mausoleum, not yet returned to what it was before.

What Aleppo’s experience teaches us, and what we are continuing to learn:

• Honor the scars: Don’t sanitize history. Authenticity matters to community healing.
• Empower locals: Let those rooted in place guide priorities—not outside “experts.” Community guides true recovery.
• Expect friction: Restoration after trauma is messy; progress isn’t linear.
• Celebrate small wins: Every open shop, every returned handshake, is a victory.
• See markets as social infrastructure: Beyond commerce, they are repair workshops for civic trust. They support the healing process.
• Remember you are never “finished”—always becoming: Markets, like cities, are living things, never static. Anticipate and accept evolution.

The rehabilitation of the first souq in Aleppo was completed in 2019. What’s truly remarkable is that, despite all the political shifts and changes in governance since then, it was that first spark—born from within the community—that inspired others. Between 2019 and 2025, more than nine souqs have been restored, each building on the belief that recovery is possible, even in the most fractured of settings.

Restoration here isn’t a finish line. It’s an open question. But for every city clawing its way back from ruin, Aleppo’s souq is proof that sometimes, a market can save a city’s soul. And that’s worth believing in.

—

Ali Esmaiel is an International Management and Communication Consultant and Former CEO for Aga Khan Trust for Culture in Syria. Known for his groundbreaking work in post-conflict urban development, cultural heritage preservation, and humanitarian strategy, his most recognized achievement is the restoration of Aleppo’s Souq Saqatiyeh, which earned the ICCROM Sharjah Award and stands as a global benchmark for heritage-led recovery. Ali’s expertise spans Syria, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Switzerland, and Canada, where he has worked with governments, communities, and multilateral institutions to bridge policy with lived experience. His academic path, spanning the UK, France, the US, and Syria, brings together strategic insight, diplomatic finesse, and grounded cultural fluency. Ali doesn’t just rebuild physical spaces—he revitalizes memory, identity, and hope where they’ve been most endangered.