“If only something was left” – An Antiochian story through locals’ eyes

The book “If only something was left” – An Antiochian story through locals’ eyes is a study of oral stories. The purpose of this study is to narrate through the eyes of the different local communities the history of the reformation that was spread from the Iskender Sanjak district to the Hatay district under the french order, and to broaden the memories of the social, cultural, politic and financial life of that period of time.
Except for a research based on the view of the official history or the traditional method of filing the written history, it is also a research that wants to transmit the locals’ side of the history, their memories of everyday life and the local reflection of the political history limits through the method of the native oral story.
Every book contains one or more stories. The book you hold with your hands is like that and is full of sad and happy stories. Everything you read on these pages were put on paper after interviews that were conducted from 2011 to 2017.

“These meetings took place at a village’s coffee house under the shadow of a huge sycamore tree or at a church’s yard, sometimes they were based on dozens of people’s vigilant eyes or on a house’s gloom room where silence and poverty resonated. The questions that were asked were nonjudgmental and the interviews were conducted in a variety of forms according to the interviewee’s personal will. For example some were video or voice recorded and others were just giving simple notes. The researchers wrote down in detail the testimonies and the narrations, they read and interpreted them again and again and, at last, they put them together in a meaningful sum. It is a good thing that these testimonies found you, because, it is not only the majority of interviewees that was devastated, but also the majority of the places they referred to was simultaneously destroyed from the last lethal earthquake. After this vast earthquake destruction, it is of vital importance for us to convey Antiochia the way its people narrate it and to understand the local history through their words.”