09/11/2026
🗺️ Introducing the Mesopotamia Oral History Project 🗺️
Across the lands that make up Mesopotamia, an irreplaceable archive is vanishing: languages, dialects, and the stories that carry generations of knowledge about weather, plants, farming, medicine, and folklore.
Conflict, climate change, and migration are accelerating the loss. We may have only a few years left to capture this knowledge from the last generation who lived it before the Information Age changed everything.
The Mesopotamia Oral History Project, led by Senior Fellow Dr. Hannah Stork, features a team of local storytellers recruited from communities along the Path. Fellows will walk the trails, working to build a first-person "library of disappearing things" in their own words and their own languages. Collection is now underway!
The project unfolds in three phases:
📍 Phase One: Ibrahim Yolu corridor, near Şanlıurfa, Türkiye
📍 Phase Two: Tur Abdin region to the Kurdistan Region of Iraq border
📍 Phase Three: The full Zagros Mountain Trail, Kurdistan Region of Iraq
Stay tuned for an introduction to the team and a behind-the-scenes look at the training session!