Photo taken on April 7, 2021 shows a view of sunset in Damascus, Syria.(Photo: Xinhua)

At a library of the Greek Orthodox patriarchate in Syria's capital Damascus, Rajaa Rajha has been working tirelessly and passionately day after day to restore ancient manuscripts.

"I enjoy my work. I feel like these manuscripts have been traveling through time to come to me, waiting for me to give them another time to travel to," Rajha told the Xinhua News Agency.

It is worth noting that Rajha did not study restoration at university, where she majored in physics and chemistry. However, she has ingeniously applied what she learnt from school to the restoration of ancient manuscripts after taking a short-term training course in Dubai in 2004.

Every day, Rajha spends long hours examining and marking manuscripts, and writing down her conception of the restoration process. She has to clean the manuscripts carefully and give every page a number so that it will not get mixed up in the process.

The most difficult part is restoring damaged pages with holes or torn edges, she noted.

Other steps include reading the scripts and inking the missing letters. For Rajha, the job is even more arduous as her colleagues have left the war-torn country one after another in the past decade and she now has to complete it all by herself. 

With time, the Syrian woman felt more attached to restoring manuscripts. She told Xinhua that she develops a personal relationship with every manuscript she restores.

"Manuscripts have touched me in a way I have never experienced before," Rajha said.

Rajha immerses herself in each manuscript to feel the materials it was made from and the hands that wrote it in the past, as if she is connecting with the past through manuscripts.

"I literally dive deep into the manuscripts, their words and meanings as well as the expressions that had been used before. Such meanings get inside of me and get me to fall in love with the manuscripts as a whole," she said.

For now, Rajha hopes to devote herself to the work as long as possible. In the future, she hopes to teach more people the restoration skills to carry on with this mission. 

Xinhua