Warden of Life and Beauty… Farewell
I first met the late visual artist Tawfiq Shaya in 2010 at a friend’s office where I was working in Jaramana, on the outskirts of Damascus. I opened the door and was startled by a stocky man with gray hair and wild eyes that said, at a glance, he was about to get up to some mischief.
A man singular in his art, his look, his cadence, his words, and his clothes. You can’t meet him and forget the details of that meeting, not even after more than fifteen years.
That day was my first personal encounter with an artist whose studio in the city of As-Suwayda I had long spied on in earlier years. My uncle would take us to marvel at the catapult you could glimpse in his workshop. The studio, the catapult, and its madcap maker felt like a fantastic tale with imaginary characters.
Fifteen years after our one meeting, the same face startled me again. This time, in a short video, he was walking away, leaning on a stick, heading toward absence, carrying nothing but his iconic presence and white crown. Tawfiq Shaya passed away in mid-July 2025, “carrying bullets in his chest,” then walking toward his chair where he had so often sat by the door chatting with passers-by, and finally closing his eyes forever.
His friends gathered at the “Juthoor” hall in As-Suwayda on the evening of Wednesday, August 25, 2025, to bid him farewell, after violence swept the city between July 14 and 17. But an exceptional artist and human being like Tawfiq, an edifice, a landmark of As-Suwayda, cannot be farewelled in a single memorial, nor wept over just once. We owe Tawfiq the duty of remembrance, the duty to keep him alive, to raise his glass together again and again, to get drunk on love of life, and to laugh as he did in the face of ugliness.
Who was Tawfiq Shaya, the artist and inventive designer?
A painter and designer, born in 1961. He graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts, Advertising Department, in the mid-1980s, and embarked on a prolific artistic journey of travel and exhibitions inside Syria and abroad. He became known for designing and crafting unique chairs that critics described as economical, easy to carry, and richly constructed. He showed models of them on his travels and took part in the International Designers’ Forum in the French city of Saint-Étienne, which hosted his exhibition in 1992.
In 2004, a French company commissioned him to build a working model of a catapult modeled on Saladin’s trebuchet, the very catapult I had once stolen glimpses of as it took shape, years before meeting its ingenious maker. It was tested in the Palmyra desert and on Tell Shihan north of As-Suwayda, and its construction was documented in a French film.
Perhaps one of the most important milestones of his artistic journey was his 200-square-meter kite that flew over Damascus in 2008 when the city was the Arab Capital of Culture, alongside twenty-two other kites, each measuring thirty square meters. One of them carried the image of Fairuz, whom Tawfiq adored, as his friends recount, the day she gave her concert as part of the festivities.
He later created an art project honoring the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, printing Darwish’s poems on kite tails so they would fly as a “book in the air” over As-Suwayda. He carried out the project more than once and in more than one location, including Tell Jinjala in the As-Suwayda countryside, which hosted a symposium for Syrian, Arab, and international sculptors, and in the Ayn al-Marj area of the As-Suwayda countryside, where he arranged a kite show and a workshop teaching children how to make kites. The event lasted a full week, and Tawfiq named the site “Mahmoud Darwish Airport”, a name many in As-Suwayda still use for that spot on the mountain road.
Among his last works was a kite he designed, built, and later flew at an event in Salakhid Stadium in the city of Salakhid, south of As-Suwayda, on World Autism Awareness Day, bearing the slogan “You are not alone… we are with you.”
Who was Tawfiq Shaya, the human being and the friend?
The youngest of four siblings (two sisters and two brothers), the eldest being the late film director Riad Shaya. Tawfiq lived until his death in “Jannat al-Ramad”, “Garden of Ashes”, the name his friends gave his home in As-Suwayda after one of them wrote Adonis’s poem of the same title on the metal exterior wall of his studio adjoining the house. His friends have not yet been able to talk about him at length, still trying to absorb the loss and believe his departure, so they chose instead to write their own elegies for him.
The teacher and writer Osama Hanidi describes his first meeting with Tawfiq: “When I entered his studio and workshop for the first time fifteen years ago, I felt surrounded by enchantment on all sides, as if Dionysus had merged for a moment with Apollo to produce this spell, every detail a charm, every corner virginal. Even dinner that night, after the glasses, had a theoretical space on scraps of paper on which Tawfiq wrote the ingredients of the pastry mix. In truth, it was a recipe for drawing in both the person and the place.”
Hanidi adds: “When you see that man crowned in white, running across open fields with a kite string in his hand, you’ll know what kind of child Tawfiq was. When you see him rocking the swing he made with his own hands for children, strung between two trees with ropes of joy, you’ll know what kind of heart he had. When you sit comfortably on a plush chair he crafted one day, you might realize his hands were furnishing this ruin to turn it into cushions for our dreams and our delights. Tawfiq the human is fashioned from the salt of the earth, the clay of pleasures, and the clamor of basalt.”
He continues in his elegy: “He wasn’t a voracious or professional reader, but he had a magical ear that gathered the nectar of words from all his friends and scattered it with the tone of someone touched by the first fruit of language, so that the honey of noisy delights would be born. He loved the Rahbani brothers to the point of madness, and every branch of their school. He always told me the Rahbanis had said everything and were the most complete Arab musical school. He couldn’t stomach any kind of sorrowful singing, and in his garden he always played songs that celebrated freedom, life, and joy.” He adds: “That’s how Tawfiq let his nature loose like a kite, the light breeze playing with it as it wished. How else could he occupy a plot of land up on the mountain and name it Mahmoud Darwish Airport? The landowner couldn’t help breaking into booming laughter once passers-by started asking him where Mahmoud Darwish Airport was.”
Qusai Maqlad (a writer), who says he met Tawfiq in 2011, shortly after the Syrian uprising began, and that Tawfiq took him in during difficult moments, wrote: “In bidding farewell to Tawfiq Shaya, we are not writing about a passing man or an ordinary memory. We are mourning a man who lived on the edge between poetry and madness, between chaos and stillness, between cursing the darkness and lighting a candle from a poem, a man unlike anyone else who will not be repeated.” He adds: “In the heart of his home, he built a special world, a small homeland for the outcast, the passer-by, and the burdened. Anyone who sat there felt the place breathe with his spirit, stones and trees glowing with his light. Without him? Only silent walls and lifeless branches.”
Maqlad recounts the bond that brought him closer to the late artist when he sought refuge with him at a moment of weakness and collapse: “Depression overcame me until my body failed me. I fled to the Garden of Ashes. He didn’t ask me a single question, didn’t demand an explanation or a justification. He treated me like a father of rare tenderness, held me in his silence, let me sleep in peace, and woke me with his laughter. There I met Tawfiq the human being, not just the legend, and I loved him more.”
Screenwriter and writer Mohammad Mallak also mourned Tawfiq: “If our age has a modern-day Tarafa ibn al-‘Abd, someone who sanctifies life and lives it to the last drop, it would be Tawfiq Shaya: the human being, the artist, the friend. A force of positive life, energy, love, and beauty. You could never meet him and forget him. He was a man of solutions and resolve that ordinary people neither possess nor can muster.” He continues, summoning Shaya’s spirit: “Who else would seek a funeral for Mahmoud Darwish in the sky, when Tawfiq’s kite flew with a tail the size of half a dunam bearing Darwish’s face and radiant verses? Who else could turn the simplest words into epics as he spoke them? Who else could make from a glass of arak, a handful of mountain tomatoes, and balls of labneh an unforgettable feast? In his workshop, things had meanings of their own and words their own intentions. Between his white beard, tousled hair, smile, and fervor, joy sprouted, life gleamed, and friendship blossomed.”
Mallak adds: “Tawfiq and those like him are the wardens of life and beauty, standing against the ugliness of destruction and death that packs of rabid dogs drive forward. What I am certain of is that a memory, an example, a force, a presence, an art, and a humanity like Tawfiq Shaya’s cannot die, just as I am certain that the will to live in As-Suwayda will defeat siege and death, and its people will carry on the message of love, goodness, and peace.”
This is Tawfiq Shaya through the eyes and hearts of his friends, a landmark of As-Suwayda who will always be present there. Not because he was an unrepeatable artist and designer alone, nor because he was a mad dreamer outside the ordinary, nor because he was an extraordinary friend to young and old, but because he was a magical blend of all that. He alone turned spent shells into bells he rang for Syria. He is the one who gave away one of his kites for four bullets he fired, gleeful and victorious, to save a life those bullets had been promised to take. Farewell, Tawfiq.
