Photo Essays

A mosque and street in the Scutari district of Constantinople, in a fascinating image which gives an impression of day-to-day life during the latter years of the Ottoman Empire

The last years of the Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire, founded in 1299, collapsed in November 1922, when the last sultan, Mehmed VI, was sent into exile. The First World War ...More

Shots ring out: in the early afternoon multiple shots followed by screaming were reported outside London's Houses of Parliaments. Authorities rushed to the scene as the House of Commons went into lockdown. The first reports came in from political reporters barred from leaving the premises

UK capital shaken by terror attack

Abed, 11, a Syrian refugee in Beirut, sitting in front of graffiti by Karim Tamerji, entitled ′Evolution′. Since the beginning of the civil war in Syria, the conflict has spilt over into Lebanon, in the form of both suicide attacks and a huge immigrant influx

Lebanon: Colours of unity in a divided city

For years synonymous with for sectarianism, a fifteen-year-long civil war, car bombings and suicide attacks, Beirut is slowly undergoing a ...More

Dust cloud with toxic particles: in Ahwaz, the instruments that monitor pollution from particulates were out of action for days. "Within hours, there was dust everywhere. Suddenly, I had red spots on my whole body. My skin felt like it was on fire and I was hospitalised,″ says Rosita, a teacher in Khuzestan, the capital of an Iranian province rich in oil

Iran: paralysed by environmental neglect

Iranian politicians like to refer to their country as an "island of stability" in the Middle East. But the country has severe ...More

The blue of Harar: the houses in the old quarter are the most spectacular aspect of the city′s cultural heritage. Deceptively plain in appearance on the outside, the traditional houses always feature a courtyard and feature exquisitely designed interiors. The majority of these traditional houses have been preserved

Harar in Ethiopia – a unique cultural gem

On the UNESCO World Heritage list since 2006, Harar in eastern Ethiopia is truly a place apart. Considered the fourth holiest city of ...More

According to the Institute of Iranian Contemporary Historical Studies, the D′Arcy carnival was celebrated in the spring of 1933. The main reason for the celebration was Iran′s termination of the D′Arcy concession after a dispute with the British government and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company

Tehran 1933 – The D′Arcy Carnival

The D′Arcy carnival procession in Iran took place in 1933. Under the regime of Reza Shah Pahlawi ...More

The most impressive Hussainiya can be found in Kashan, a two-hour drive south of Tehran. The “Mad of Hussein" meet there every afternoon during the month of Muharram. At the mention of his death, screams of pain can be heard in the Hussainiya, men start weeping like children and sobbing

Ashura in Iran

Muharram is the first month of the Islamic calendar. On the tenth day, Ashura (the number ten in Arabic) will be celebrated to commemorate ...More

1. Grape picking on the Al-Natsheh plantation begins at first light. During the harvesting season, some 15 helpers gather the grapes and pack them into crates

Sweet grapes from Palestine – The grape farmers of Al-Baqa'a

In the Palestinian village of Al-Baqa'a to the east of the city of Hebron, is one of the region's oldest vineyards – surrounded by an ...More

1. On the eve of the traditional camel wrestling festival in the western Turkish city of Selcuk, the first priority is to impress the beauty contest selection committee. Candidates are draped in colourful attire and hung with bells. The camels are then led on a rope through the streets accompanied by the sounds of drums and flutes

Traditional camel wrestling in Selcuk: "once in the ring, things get serious!"

You won′t find cockfights or bullfights in the west of Turkey. Instead, elaborately decorated camels enter the ring here – to the pride of ...More

Beyond capacity: On one cold night in December, some 750 homeless people in Tehran went to a homeless shelter – called Khavaran – to stay warm. Until then, the shelter hadn't housed more than 400 people on a single night

Iran's homeless: Cardboard boxes and vacant graves

Iran has experienced a dramatic increase in the number of homeless people in the past few years. Rights activists blame President Rouhani ...More

Celebrating Orthodox Christmas in Istanbul

Orthodox Christmas is celebrated on 6 January with a festive mass led by Patriarch Bartholomew I in the Church of St. George in Istanbul. ...More

War photographer: Andy Spyra was born in the western German city of Hagen in 1984. After finishing school he travelled around Central America and Southeast Asia while discovering his passion for photography. From 2007 to 2009, he studied photo-journalism and documentary photography at an academy in Hanover. He travels to war zones frequently, typically taking black-and-white pictures on long-term assignments

War photographer Andy Spyra: more than just pictures

He travels to Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Nigeria. There’s hardly any war region that he hasn't visited. And usually, he comes back with ...More

A precious fragrance: after livestock, the frankincense trade is the largest source of revenue in Somaliland. But harvesting frankincense is not an easy task: among other things, harvesters must scale rocky hillsides and cliff faces, while fending off venomous snakes

Somaliland′s frankincense trade under threat

Somaliland′s wild frankincense forests are under threat as global demand for essential oils rockets. Unsustainable harvesting has ...More

City in shock: on Tuesday morning, just hours after a truck ploughed into a Christmas market in the heart of the city, candles and roses had been laid near the entrance of a nearby station. Security forces are patrolling trains and train stations, police are on high alert in Berlin as flags fly at half-mast. Streets in the area of the incident remain closed off, and buses have been re-routed

Berlin attack: an overview in pictures

The tomb of Muhammad Ahmad in Omdurman, near Khartoum in Sudan. In his homeland, he was known only as the "Mahdi" (the redeemer). He led a rebellion against the British, who ruled Sudan until 1956

The Sufis of Khartoum

Sufism – the mystical path of Islam – enjoys a long tradition in Sudan. Sufis aspire to achieve perfection of worship through music, dance ...More

Since the failed putsch attempt of 15 July and the purges against Gulen supporters in Turkey, many who have chosen Istanbul as their adopted home have had to re-evaluate their relationship to the city bridging two continents. Even though the Facebook pages of expats are full of concerned comments this year, many have no intention of simply leaving Istanbul

Istanbul, my adopted home – despite putsch, terrorism and repression

Istanbul exerts a unique appeal not only on tourists, as it is also the adopted home of the largest expat community in Turkey. Nonetheless ...More

A new home: until this year, Majd Kara had never been to Vilnius. Now the capital of Lithuania has become the Syrian painter's home and he has even found a temporary studio close to the city centre. "But I will have to give the keys back. The studio has no heating, so during the last months of autumn I was painting with frozen hands. But I will find some new place. I will continue painting," he says

Syrian painter challenges Lithuania's fear of refugees

Fleeing war-torn Syria, painter Majd Kara found himself in Lithuania where half the population says they refuse to help asylum-seekers. ...More

First cities: humanity′s first cities were founded on the banks of Euphrates and Tigris Rivers around 6,000 years ago. Over three millennia, the Mesopotamian civilisation developed into a dense network of cities, eventually giving rise to veritable urban centres like Babylon and Nineveh, the latter reconstructed here in an illustration

Mesopotamia: cradle of civilisation

The land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers in the Middle East is one of the cradles of Western civilisation. Many inventions from ...More

Iraqi army discovers a mass grave: while Iraqi troops advanced further into territory held by the so called “Islamic State” in their campaign to recapture Mosul, they found a mass grave which holds about 100 bodies, many of them decapitated. AP footage shows bones and decomposed bodies dug out of the ground by a bulldozer. This Iraqi federal police officer holds a stuffed animal he found on the site

Liberating Mosul from "Islamic State"

What has happened in Mosul since the operation to retake the city from the so-called "Islamic State" started in October? Photo essay by ...More

Street art in the Afghan capital: a group of Afghan activists and artists has painted graffiti on concrete blast walls that protect government buildings, businesses, embassies and homes of powerful people in Kabul. They're known as the Afghan "Banksy" after the famous graffiti artist from Bristol. Their street art highlights social problems in Afghanistan after almost four decades of war

Afghan 'Banksy' takes Kabul

A group of Afghan artists has painted graffiti on the walls of government buildings, businesses and embassies in Kabul. They call ...More

"The Memory Matrix" is a temporary public space intervention by Bosnian-Austrian artist and architectural historian Azra Aksamija. Thousands of Plexiglas pixels are arranged in order to give a digital physical image of aspects of destroyed heritage. Each pixel was designed by project participants and contains outlines of buildings and destroyed cultural heritage

Qalandiya International: Palestine's contemporary arts festival

Throughout the month of October, several cities across the West Bank, Gaza and Israel have been hosting the Qalandiya International ...More

Total destruction: photographer Yusuke Suzuki travelled over the Turkish border into Aleppo, in Syria. This picture in his series "City of Chaos" shows a once-lively shopping street. "When I arrived in Aleppo, I realised that there wasn't any water, gas, electricity, nor medicine, schools, jobs or baby milk here, he said

Photographer Yusuke Suzuki: Discovering the meaning of war

Japanese photographer Yusuke Suzuki has just received the Award for Young Emerging Talents at the Berlin Photo Biennial. To understand ...More

The many faces of Mazar-i-Sharif: this old man is one of more than 100 Afghans that German photographer Jens Umbach has captured during his visits to the northern city of Mazar-i-Sharif

The Afghans – A different perspective

German photographer Jens Umbach travelled to the north of Afghanistan to pay tribute to the people affected by the German military mission ...More

Palestine at the turn of the last century – Gustaf Dalman's glass slide collection in Jerusalem

Gustaf Dalman (1855-1941) is viewed as the founder of Palestine studies in Germany. As the first director of a German archaeological ...More

This rescued lion was meant to appear on a TV show. Generally, however, Lebanese zoos sell their animals to private individuals. Now, however, this could all be coming to an end. Lebanon′s Minister of Agriculture Akram Chehayeb recently announced that "all animals held by illegal traders and outlets are to be seized. These animals belong neither in a cage nor private house as symbols of power and prestige"

Stop Lebanon′s illegal animal trade

Poor government, economic recession, cultural norms: all factors that have turned Lebanese zoos into hotbeds of illegal animal trading. An ...More

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Most Recent Photo Essay

Crumbling colonial splendour in Karachi

More than 70 years after Pakistan's foundation, architectural jewels dating from the British colonial era are being torn down – especially in the economic metropolis of Karachi, many buildings are threatened by the demolition ball. Impressions by Syed Raza Hassan and Akhtar Soomro

Qantara dossier: European travellers in the Orient

(photo: Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung im Hausarchiv des Bankhauses Sal. Oppenheim)

Our dossier contains a selection of interesting biographies and reports on renowned European travelers to the Orient from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.More

Goethe-Institut's Perspektiven: Generational conflict

Goethe-Institut Perspektiven logo (source: Goethe-Institut)

Egypt, Algeria, Lebanon… six young women and men from six different countries put their individual views and experience with the generational conflict into words for this dossier.More

Top 10 books about Muslims and Islam by Saadia Faruqi

Media stereotypes and misinformation about Muslims are nothing new. In post-election America, Muslims are finding more allies who often want to help but don’t know much about Islam. More and more non-Muslims have questions and are seeking answers.More

An eye-catching tableau for resistance: graffiti art in Bethlehem

The trailblazer: in 2005, the legendary British street artist Banksy visited the West Bank and left behind nine stencilled graffiti images on the wall and on private buildings in and around Bethlehem. His satirical and critical commentary on Israel's occupation policy marked the start of an onslaught of international and Palestinian graffiti artists – amateurs and professionals alike – who have adorned the wall with their political and personal messages.

An eye-catching tableau for resistance: graffiti art in Bethlehem

In 2002, the then Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon approved the construction of a barrier wall that would run along the ceasefire line of 1949 with the intention of separating Israeli territories from the Palestinian West Bank. In Bethlehem, graffiti artists have started using the wall as a canvas for political protest and socially critical art. By Laura Overmeyer

Female Kurdish singer rallies the troops

Kurdish singer Helly Luv (photo: Getty Images/Safin Hamed)

Iraqi Kurdish singer Helly Luv was in Arbil, the capital of the autonomous Kurdish region of northern Iraq, filming the video to her latest hit. Luv is aiming for international fame as she releases her new English song 'Revolution', calling for action against terrorism and violence.More

Syria's Cultural Heritage in Danger

Over four millennia, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek and Roman influences crossed paths in Syria. Today, precious cultural sites from these eras are being damaged as the Syrian civil war takes its toll on the country's cultural heritage. This week, the United Nation's cultural organization UNESCO made fresh reports about damage to Syria's historic sites.

Syria's Cultural Heritage in Danger

The civil war in Syria, which has taken the lives of thousands since 2011, is becoming increasingly brutal. Valuable cultural sites are also being destroyed in the fighting. UNESCO has now provided reports on the damage.

"The Crusades: Holy War"

Dr Thomas Asbridge (source: BBC.co.uk)

In this three-part documentary by BBC 2, Dr Thomas Asbridge presents a revelatory account of the Crusades, the 200-year war between Christians and Muslims for control of the Holy Land.More