text

The art collector Karl Ernst Osthaus (1874–1921) purchased the room in Damascus in 1899 for his newly-established, visionary Folkwang Museum. However, due to the premises’ ceilings not being high enough, it was never erected there. Instead, it was donated to Dresden in 1930. For unknown reasons, the room stayed packed in storage for further decades. In 1997, a project for its conservation and re-installation was initiated. Thanks to the support of the Museum and Research Foundation and the Gerda Henkel Foundation, a team of German and Syrian conservators was able to complete a major part of the complex conservation and restoration undertaking between 2014 and 2016. Three fully restored walls were assembled in March 2017 and now, for the first time in a very long time, offer a glimpse into the highly-developed bourgeois culture of one of the oldest trading cities in the world.