Syria in their hearts: Syrians reflect on the meaning of home

A new exhibition at the National Gallery of Ireland tells the stories of some of the countless Syrians displaced by the country’s savage civil war

Zuhair Fakir, Angham Younes and Lorca Fakir, 10, were welcomed to Dunshaughlin in Co Meath by the Community Sponsorship programme. Picture: Bryan Meade

“I’ll always be biased when I talk about Syria. It is home, the place where I learned how to drive and had good laughs with my best friends and graduated as a software engineer and fell in love.”

Suad Aldarra is a data scientist and writer now living in Dublin. Like millions of her fellow citizens, her life was upended by the war that ignited a little over a decade ago in March 2011.

At ...