Khazaaen Archive Celebrates Its Five-Year Anniversary

On Saturday, October 30, 2021, Khazaaen celebrated its five-year anniversary at its location in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem. 

Khazaaen, which literally means “lockers” in Arabic, could more precisely be translated as “treasuries.” This is in reference to ancient Arab libraries that knew the value of amassing valuable forms of knowledge. Knowledge, in this respect, pertains to preserving details of daily life in Palestine from different time periods.

The founder of the project, Fady Asleh, an archivist and doctoral student in history, had come up with the initiative with the support of talented Palestinian volunteers. The process began with the collection of ephemera (collectible memorabilia, typically written or printed), as a means to document the local daily life for the next generations.

Today, five years after the launch of the project in October 2016, Khazaaen has become a societal archive documenting, organizing, and preserving Arab heritage and culture. With plenty of individuals who are just as fascinated by the personal and collective history of the region, the project has rapidly expanded to several other countries, including Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria, Qatar, and others. The entity itself is in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of Jerusalem, but the digital archive (khazaaen.org) is available and accessible for the public.

Today, there are close to 6,000 items in Khazaaen’s digital platform. Meanwhile, there are more than 140 ephemera dating back from the year 1850 to the present moment. Artists, researchers, historians, and residents at large are now able to access treasures of handwritten documents, photographs, posters, and all types of props from different eras—all assembled in one place. The Khazaaen website has had more than 120,000 visits so far, with tens of thousands of followers on their social media pages.

Since the start of the project, Khazaaen has received an unprecedented list of documents, shared by various individuals from different Arab countries. Some persons shared their items as a way to support the collective endeavor, but others decided to share their precious ephemera at Khazaaen in order to preserve them in a safe place for years to come. In this way, these items are protected on behalf of the individuals themselves, and at the same time, they assist the wider community to piece together the puzzle of their own shared history. These personal memorabilia tell stories of displacement and destruction but also of celebrating daily life.

Perhaps most important about this project are the “treasuries” themselves. The way that the now-director of Khazaaen, Hatem Tahhan, describes it: “Any individual who has historical material can get to have their own personal locker, which would be well-protected, stored in their name, and properly maintained for decades to come.” Khazaaen basically collects otherwise fragmented ephemera (from the private space) and stores it into well-organized and preserved lockers (shared in the public domain). In this way, it creates a community archive and makes it possible for future generations to trace their ancestral history, all the while aspiring to keep the collective memory alive.

The preservation of history is not an easy task. Many official documents pertaining to Arab history had gone missing throughout the various periods and wars, and this has had repercussions on political affairs. However, the organizers of Khazaaen were not solely interested in official or governmental documents. They were rather intrigued by the social details of daily life—the everyday.

Such details, it turns out, are often found in what some might deem trivial or irrelevant. Personal collectible memorabilia, such as receipts, film and music tickets, wedding invitations, and business cards, are valuable props, since they contain historic knowledge. One can imagine how those and other items such as certificates, letters, polls, and maps could inform our own generation and future generations about regional transformations. They provide so much visual input about societal trends and realities such as modes of travel and transportation, marketing fonts and styles, cultural performances, industrial changes, and geopolitical disruptions. Details such as those found in newspapers, magazines, posters, photographs, and personal papers such as bills, business cards, and theater programs can tell countless stories about the places and the people who lived in them. If lost and not properly archived, there is a strong chance that these facts about people, events, places, and information will most probably be perished, never to be retrieved.

Having access to these collections is also great for the imagination. It is one thing to read about certain social, cultural, and political events, but it is a whole new ball game when one gets the chance to see tickets, photographs, stamps, and handwritten articles from those times. Among the collected items shared at Khazaaen’s digital archive are such gems as family photos of individuals taken in front of what used to be the Jerusalem International Airport (at Qalandiya) and tickets for the concert of Fairuz, the musical icon of Lebanon, who performed in Jerusalem back in 1964.