Lebanese authorities contacted Unesco officials to express their 'deepest concerns' over reports indicating the 'destruction and complete demolition of the Citadel of Chama' by military bulldozing operations.'
On Holy Saturday, as Palestinian Christians tried to reach the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Israeli security forces started attacking and arresting them, demonstrating a clear violation of religious freedoms.
The designation prohibits the sites from being targeted or used for military purposes, with violations potentially constituting serious breaches of the 1954 Hague Convention and grounds for criminal responsibility.
Textiles are a window into the communities that created them, with every motif and line signalling a different memory, tradition or identity. Often seen as folk art, these pieces of embroidery and weaving bring together dozens of narrative threads, from Japan to South America. But nowhere is it more fraught with meaning than in Palestine.
"It doesn't matter what [story] you want to tell-maps help bring it to life, they help you connect to spaces. And it has to be interactive. You have to be able to read, to click."
Berat is a UNESCO World Heritage Site because of its unique historic downtown characterized by 18th and 19th century Ottoman structures and urban design, but human presence in the area goes back to the 4th/3rd millennium B.C. and there is evidence of an urban settlement in Berat defined by defensive walls dating to the 7th-6th century B.C.
A compleat Persian Palace--there are many minor variations and lesser imitations--is distinguished by its exaggerated moldings, numberless layers of cornices, elaborate grillework and columns galore. A Persian Palace brazenly combines motifs and wantonly disregards proportion and scale.
Two hundred and fifty-six Quran memorisers—Palestinians who have committed the entire holy book to memory—sat in the place while companions beside them listened attentively, following each word carefully to ensure the recitation remained flawless. The gathering, titled Safwat Al-Huffaz—The Elite of Quran Memorisers, has become a special collective way of observing Ramadan in Gaza.
Beit Hawa, is a residential project in Uptown Cairo shaped by the ethos of morphosis, where the interior architecture functions as an adaptive system rather than a static arrangement. The design moves away from rigid modernist typologies, employing fluid spatial sequences that negotiate transitions between private and public zones. Surfaces and volumes are defined through layered materiality, integrating light, texture, and structural clarity into a coherent spatial syntax. Circulation operates as a generative element, creating smooth shifts that dissolve conventional boundaries between functions.
An intact mosaic from Late Antiquity discovered during restoration of a historic municipal building in Istanbul is now a floor again, covered in plexiglass and welcoming visitors to the new Zeytinburnu Mosaic Museum. Visitors of Turkey's newest museum move across elevated glass walkways, suspended right above the original floors themselves. The mosaics are not relocated fragments mounted on walls, but surfaces that remain exactly where they were first laid, preserving their context for all to see.
A conversation with Alicia Walker on the pseudo-Arabic inscriptions (or pseudo-kufic) that appear on a number of tenth- and eleventh-century churches in Greece, most notably at the monastery of Hosios Loukas. What did the Arabic script signify in Orthodox culture at the time if not tension with Islam? Alicia Walker is Professor of History of Art at Bryn Mawr College.
The Byzantine-era church lies half hidden in the shade. Roman columns rise from among the olive trees, even older ruins linked to Israelite kings are overgrown. To the west, the Mediterranean is just visible on the horizon. To the north and south are the hills of the occupied West Bank. In the small town of Sebastia, a hundred metres or less east of the ruins, everyone is very worried.
Senior clergy say outside agendas are fracturing Christian unity in the Holy Land and undermining their authority. Senior Christian leaders in Jerusalem have issued a warning against outside interference threatening the unity and future of Christianity in the Holy Land, singling out Christian Zionism and political actors linked to Israel. In a statement released on Saturday, the Patriarchs and Heads of the Churches in Jerusalem said recent activities by local individuals advancing damaging ideologies, such as Christian Zionism, mislead the public,
