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3. Maaloula: The Silent Exile of an Ancient Language

Nestled on the cliffsides at the foothills of the Qalamoun mountains, Maaloula gazes out over the void. Behind the picturesque façade of its alleys and its millennia-old language lies a harsher reality: a language and culture under siege. A minority identity caught in the grip of centralizing nationalism, institutionalized othering and a century of quiet assimilation.

Maaloula is not dying, it’s fading away. Slowly. Politically. Systematically.

The Myth of National Homogeneity vs. the Margins

“Our language has no official documents. It exists, but without legal recognition,” says a resident who wished to remain anonymous. A language without status, visibility or rights.

Since the founding of the Syrian Arab Republic, national unity has been built on a rigid foundation: one people, one language, one state. Arab identity was promoted as a unifying bond, a response to Ottoman and colonial fragmentation. But over time, this bond has gradually overshadowed the margins. In 1953, the first education reform imposed Arabic as the sole language of instruction across all regions.

Starting in the 1960s, particularly under the Baathist regime, minority languages—Kurdish, Aramaic, Syriac and Turkmen—were gradually removed from the education system in the name of “republican cohesion.” The 1973 Syrian Constitution reinforced this approach: Article 1 declares that “the people of the Arab region of Syria are part of the Arab Nation,” Article 4 establishes “Arabic as the official language,” and Article 21 which addresses principles and education, emphasizes that “national and social culture form the foundation for building a united socialist Arab society, aiming to strengthen moral values aligned with the ideals of the Arab Nation.” From that point on, the Syrian nation was conceived and taught exclusively in Arabic.

In Maaloula, this policy has led to the gradual disappearance of the language from public life. At school, children learn in Arabic and rarely speak their mother tongue. In practice, Aramaic is neither taught in schools nor recognized by institutions. Officially, only Arabic and Classical Arabic hold legal recognition. As a result, intergenerational transmission depends entirely on spoken language within the home. “My children understand me when I speak Aramaic, but they answer in Arabic,” says Rita, 45, a teacher at the village’s public school.

Aramaic: From Living Heritage to Marginalized Symbol

This invisibility doesn’t mean total erasure. Aramaic isn’t banned, it’s tolerated, but only as ornamentation. It’s a case of “controlled otherness:” allowing the Other to exist in the collective imagination, always at the edges, never at the center. Aramaic is permitted as folklore, not as a living language. In Syrian state media, it appears only in a handful of heritage songs, traditional dances or religious recitations, usually set against ancient stone backdrops, filmed by candlelight, as if to highlight its exotic nature.

“They come here to film us during Christmas Mass, ask for a rendition of the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, then return to Damascus with footage of a ‘tolerant’ country,” says Rena, with a touch of irony. She is a resident of Maaloula and a choir singer in the village church.

In that sense, Maaloula’s residents become background figures in an imagined Syria, “a multicultural postcard, a PR tool for a regime that claims to rise above sectarian divisions. But of course, it’s just a façade,” says sociologist Daniel Meier. What he calls the “folklorization” or “museumification” of identity is, in this case, a state strategy: one that neutralizes the political significance of minority languages by confining them to a heritage narrative stripped of any contemporary claims.

A curated, depoliticized and easy-to-digest otherness.

A Double Identity Wound: Aramaic Christians in the Crosswinds

This marginalization is accompanied by a second silence: that of religion. The community of Maaloula, predominantly Christian, finds itself caught between two forms of otherness: a fading language and a minority faith.

In Maaloula, the majority of the population is Christian. Greek Catholics and Greek Orthodox live side by side, speak the same language and share the memory of a minority community in a country that is about 90% Muslim. Syrian Christianity has an ancient history, but in the modern political context of the Syrian state, it has often been erased or exploited.

“When people talk about coexistence in Syria, they refer to an unspoken pact: you are allowed to practice your faith as long as you remain politically invisible,” explains Elias, a history teacher in Damascus.

The Syrian regime claims to be secular. In reality, it depends on a fragile sectarian balance and the constant manipulation of religious affiliations. In 1973, when Hafez al-Assad briefly removed the constitutional requirement that the president be Muslim, widespread protests erupted, forcing the regime to reverse the decision. This episode revealed the true limits of Syria’s secularism.

From then on, being Christian and speaking a non-Arabic language meant facing two layers of marginalization. It meant living on a double periphery within a state shaped by pan-Arab ideology.

“Aramaeans in Syria are a minority within a minority. They face double ostracism,” emphasizes sociologist Daniel Meier.

“When I wanted to record a small collection of poems in Aramaic, I was asked to translate them into Literary Arabic to make them ‘accessible,’” recalls Mireille, an amateur poet from Maaloula. “We are always asked to adapt. Why can’t it be the other way around?”

Behind this demand for Arab identity lies a clear divide between the dominant and the dominated. Language is never neutral, in Syria and elsewhere. It is a form of power: the power to name, to speak and to exist in the public sphere.

Politics as a Tool

Since 2011, the Syrian civil war has intensified deep-rooted identity fractures, turning Maaloula into a stage for both symbolic and physical violence. In September 2013, the village was attacked by the Al-Nusra Front, a jihadist group linked to Al-Qaeda. This assault went beyond territorial control, it was an attack on an entire collective memory.

The Syrian regime’s military intervention to retake Maaloula in 2014 was accompanied by a carefully crafted political narrative. Maaloula became a symbol in official discourse: a diverse Syria threatened by extremism yet saved by the central government. Sociologist Daniel Meier argues that the village’s residents were the “useful idiots” of the Baathist regime, exploited to legitimize its system of identity fragmentation.

This glorifying narrative, echoed by state media, aims to affirm the regime’s legitimacy and its role as protector of religious minorities, turning Maaloula into a symbol of national resilience. “After the liberation, everyone wanted Maaloula to be the perfect image of Syria, the regime claims to defend. But in everyday life, nothing has changed,” says Rena.

By turning Maaloula into a showcase for a savior state, the official narrative dismisses the long-standing demands of its residents for recognition and cultural rights. This form of instrumentalization fits a broader pattern in which minority identities are acknowledged only when politically convenient, reduced to symbols when useful to those in power, and ignored whenever they challenge the notion of national uniformity.

The Aramaic-speaking community in Maaloula lives in internal exile: at home yet confined, spoken of but unheard, present yet unrecognized.

This is not a natural disappearance. It is an exile imposed by an ideology of uniformity, one that sees the nation as a monolith and views otherness as a threat. This process of erasure denies the richness of the margins and turns diversity into danger. Maaloula does not seek mere symbolic recognition, it demands to exist fully, in all its complexity and difference.

But first, it should not be seen as a mere relic.