Reconstructed boats bring lost river craft back to Mosul

MOSUL — A travelling exhibition of newly built models of six traditional Iraqi boats, none of them made for decades, has reached Mosul.

The Al-Safina project, launched by artist Rashad Salim, is on its tenth stop, hosted by the Mosul Heritage Foundation in Shifa. The collection covers the kalak, mashhouf, quffa, ashari balam, an Abbasid gondola and the Basra mahaila.

“The project was launched in 2013 to address the halt in traditional boat-making during the second half of the 20th century,” said Jabbar al-Bahadli of the Shanasheel Foundation for Heritage Revival, part of the project. Salim surveyed sites across Iraq and worked from accounts given by the children of dead craftsmen to recover measurements and designs.

Mosul’s own kalak is among them, a square raft of wood and animal skins that disappeared in the 1930s. It carried goods downstream to Baghdad, where the timber was sold to carpenters because the raft could not be brought back up against the Tigris current.

The mahaila could carry up to 30 tonnes of cargo under sail. The Abbasid gondola was reconstructed from what Bahadli described as a single approximate illustration in a 13th-century manuscript. The circular quffa, made of reeds and coated with bitumen, was used by Salim on a river journey from Turkey to the Chibayish marshes lasting about six weeks. The wooden mashhouf, which Bahadli traces to around 2000 BC, largely ceased production in the 1990s as war and the draining of the marshes broke up the communities that made it.

The project has grown from models into a fleet of more than 100 full-size boats, exhibition director Muntadhar al-Hassani said, with youth clubs taking them out between Ashar and Abu al-Khasib in Basra, through the Chibayish marshes and on waterways in Diwaniyah and Baghdad, some trips covering 40 kilometres. The Abbasid gondola is to be launched on Baghdad’s waterways once its models are finished in Basra, and organisers are working with specialists on reconstructing older vessels including an Uruk boat.