There is a convent rising from the ridges of the Qalamoun Mountains in Syria. Dating back to 547AD, Our Lady of Sednaya has the architecture of a Byzantine fortress, and is known to safeguard an ancient painting depicting Mary of Nazareth, which, according to Middle Eastern tradition, secretes a miraculous oil. It’s been a site of pilgrimage for both Muslims and Christians journeying to the Holy Land – a sacred place for all Abrahamic faiths, which now sits on the fault lines of the ongoing bloodshed in Palestine – since the Middle Ages.
And though few have seen the Marian icon, niched within the recesses of the Shanghoura Chapel, it has become a symbol of hope and healing. Sednaya – which for 13 years weathered civil conflict under Bashar al-Assad – is now witnessing the emancipation of 2,000 captives from a local prison considered the most brutal torture complex of the former president’s regime. It is also where Cynthia Merhej ’s story begins.
In the 1930s, the designer’s great-grandmother, Laurice Srouji, ran a successful couture house in Jaffa, Palestine, where she made a small fortune dressing well-heeled socialites and the wives of British colonels. “That would have been abnormal for an Arab woman,” points out Cynthia’s mum, Laura, dialling in from the Renaissance Renaissance atelier in Beirut. “And imagine: she was struggling to conceive, too.
Even the doctors couldn’t help. So, she went on a pilgrimage to Sednaya, where, one night, the Virgin.