What motivates graduate restorer Dr. Anke Scharrahs? A portrait
What motivates graduate restorer Dr. Anke Scharrahs? A portrait
Anke Scharrahs and her workplace have been part of the magnificent “Aleppo Room” for three years. Visitors watch her at work as she restores this oldest known and fully preserved wall paneling from the house of the Christian merchant Isa ibn Butrus in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin, dating from 1600/1603. It is not the first room she has researched and restored. Anke Scharrahs has visited 200 such rooms in the old town houses of Damascus and is also familiar with around 40 in museums and private collections worldwide.
She doesn’t know exactly where her love of the Orient comes from. “My parents are natural scientists and I come from Schwedt an der Oder. There’s nothing old there,” says Anke Scharrahs. But she remembers painting a lot of ornaments as a child. She started learning Hungarian at the age of twelve because she liked the language. Today she can also communicate in Persian and Arabic. She studied restoration in Dresden and came into contact with the “pile of boards” at the Museum of Ethnology, which was to determine her future professional life.
The boards, 113 numbered pieces stored in the museum depot, are the so-called Damascus Room, a richly painted room paneling created in 1810/11, the restoration of which Anke Scharrah accompanied for over twenty years. It was also so important to her because she knew that there are only a few rooms that have been preserved in their original state. Many have been reworked, altered, sanded down – depending on the fashion and taste of the owners.
As a restorer, her interest in room furnishings took her four times to the private estate Shangri La of the American collector Doris Duke in Hawaii, which is now a museum and educational center for Islamic art. The first invitation to give a lecture there on Syrian rooms came in 2004 and included the instruction to bring only a swimsuit in addition to the lecture.
Gratitude is a word Anke Scharrah uses frequently. She emphasizes that she was “allowed” to live in houses with splendid room furnishings. When she was working in Syria more than twenty years ago, she and a Syrian architect friend knocked on the doors of these old houses and explained that she was interested in the paneling. She was let in and invited, even though some of the homeowners were not aware of the significance of the room furnishings at the time. But they obviously liked the curious, open, interested restorer. “When I was in Syria before the war, I always got a message on my Syrian cell phone asking if I wanted to see another room.” She did. Always.
Anke Scharrahs speaks of the “privilege and gift of being able to help preserve these room furnishings”. She is considered THE specialist worldwide. Since the war, many room furnishings in Aleppo have been damaged, destroyed or stolen. Anke Scharrahs has summarized her research in a book – she finished the manuscript just as the war in Syria began.
She is moved to tears when she talks about the beauty of the past and the destruction of today. She is all the more appreciative of the privilege of being able to restore the oldest surviving room, the Aleppo Room in Berlin, in close cooperation with the museum.
