For nearly a century, around 300 black-and-white photographs capturing the everyday life of Yezidi communities in the Nineveh Plains – men and women in ceremonial dress, joyful wedding dances, pilgrims climbing the path toward Lalish, their holiest shrine – remained unseen. Yet long before the world came to know the Yezidis through stories of genocide and exile, these images show a vibrant, rooted people, living their traditions under the northern Iraqi sun.
Taken between 1930 and 1937, the photographs were never meant to tell the story of the Yezidis. They were, in some ways, accidental – taken by a team of American archaeologists led by Polish-born Ephraim Speiser, who was excavating the ancient sites of Tepe Gawra and Tell Billah. But as the archaeologists dug into Mesopotamia’s past, they also spent months among the Yezidis, often turning their cameras not toward ruins, but toward the people around them.
And then, for decades, silence. While Speiser’s archaeological finds were documented and published, the more human side of the expedition – the photographs of daily life – was stored away and forgotten. Until one image resurfaced.
In 2022, Katherine Blanchard, Keeper of Near East Collections at the Penn Museum, came across a striking photo of Lalish from the 1930s. She shared it with Marc Marin Webb, a PhD candidate at the University of Pennsylvania researching heritage preservation in post-conflict Yezidi communities.
“She immediately passed it to me,” Marin Webb recalls. “And what we found wasn’t just that photo – it was a whole archive.”
Long overlooked, the collection suddenly took on a new meaning, not as a side note to archaeology, but as a valuable cultural record.
Why hadn’t anyone looked at them before? “People only viewed the material through the lens of archaeology,” Marin Webb explains. “Anything not related to ruins or artifacts was simply ignored.”
The Sersal Project
Today, those images feel almost sacred. In the aftermath of the 2014 ISIS genocide, which included mass killings, forced conversions, and the destruction of Yezidi temples, they are more than old photographs. “They show what life looked like before,” Marin Webb says.
There is Bashir Saduq, a Yezidi man who worked on the digs, smiling at his wedding. Children laughing in front of a home. Pilgrims walking toward Lalish beneath the bright sky. These are not the usual media images of suffering or displacement. These are memories that survived.
“It’s refreshing to see joyful images of the Yezidis,” says Nathaniel Brunt, a photographer and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Victoria Libraries, who joined the project. “For the last decade, every photo of the Yezidis has focused on trauma. These are different. These are about life.”
Out of this discovery, a new initiative took shape: The Sersal Project, named after the Yezidi New Year. The goal was not just to preserve the photographs, but to return them to the community. In collaboration with the Penn Museum, the University of Victoria, the Mirzo Music Foundation in Sinjar, Catholic Relief Services, and the Goethe-Institut in Erbil, the team began restoring, digitizing, and researching the images.
This was no easy task. Many of the prints were damaged, the negatives brittle, and most of the people in the photos were unnamed. “It’s not just about scanning,” Marin Webb says. “It takes hours of cleaning, editing, understanding – and, most importantly, listening.”
More than a museum collection
A key part of this work was led by Alessandro Pezzati, Senior Archivist at the Penn Museum. Pezzati coordinated the digitization and repatriation of nearly 300 unpublished photographs. He ensured the archive would be freely available for non-commercial use, especially to Yezidi descendants, researchers, and artists. His efforts helped turn the project from a museum collection into something much more alive and connected.
Listening meant taking the photos back to where they were taken – showing them to elders in Sinjar, Bashiqa, and other towns. The reaction was emotional. People recognized faces, remembered names, pointed out clothing, even identified homes that no longer exist. “They were so happy,” Marin Webb says. “‘Can you give us copies?’ they asked. And of course, we did.”
That response shaped the ethics of the entire project. As Brunt explains, “These are images of the community, but they’ve been kept from the community for decades. How do we change that?”
The Penn Museum decided to do something rare: make the photos freely accessible for anyone in the Yezidi community to use, with proper credit, but without restrictions. The archive would not stay hidden behind museum walls – it would be returned to those who lived the history.
The project’s first public event took place in April 2025, during the Yezidi New Year celebrations. Exhibitions were set up in villages and towns across the region. “We wanted the moment to feel joyful,” Marin Webb says. “Not a time of mourning, but celebration.” The prints were left behind. The digital archive was shared. People gathered not to grieve, but to remember and to reclaim.
But the work is not over. Marin Webb and his colleagues believe more photographs are out there – in other archives, in other cities, perhaps even in Erbil or Mosul. “This is just the beginning,” he says. “There’s a whole visual history waiting to be uncovered.”
What the Sersal Project offers is not just old images, but a new way to think about archives. It is about returning history to the people who lived it. In a time when so much has been taken from the Yezidis, these photographs give something back: memory, dignity, presence.
“These aren’t just historical photos,” Brunt says. “They’re bridges between generations, between sorrow and healing, between silence and voice.”
And, maybe most of all, between the past that was and the future that still can be.
Qassim Khidhir has 15 years of experience in journalism and media development in Iraq. He has contributed to both local and international media outlets.
