“Jameeleh,” she said, meaning “beautiful.” I glanced in the mirror, hardly recognizing myself in this local Arab dress - I’d been made over, just like my grandfather.

Next, she wrapped a yellow scarf around my head. I raised my arms high and she slid the gown over me and pulled my hair back gently. Inside the house, Hala opened up the closet and selected a beaded burgundy dress, her pretty twenty-something daughters nearby, black liner accentuating their brown eyes. The lady introduced herself as “Hala.” She was the granddaughter of Sheikh Hammud al-Aekleh, and, I have changed her name, as I have for most of the members of the family. My wrinkled brown linen skirt and cream shirt, my backpack’s finest, apparently did not suit the occasion.

“You must go into another room and change your clothes,” Levon instructed. Loose dresses swung from the women, their faces joyful, some inked with tattoos around their lips, like strips of lace.Ī middle-aged woman in a black scarf and green dress touched my arm, as if to steer me somewhere. I looked at the men, their heads topped with red-and-white-checked headdresses or small prayer caps. “Yes,” said the usually unflappable Levon, seemingly as awed by the moment as me. “This is the family of Sheikh Hammud al-Aekleh,” my translator Levon pronounced grandly. Slowly, I stepped forward into more outstretched arms. I felt big kisses on my cheeks, hands on my shoulders, the warmth of their touch. Everyone was talking at once, the highs and lows of Arabic overlapping and rushed. As I swung my door open, dozens of men and women and children ran toward me. His car was always easy to spot because of the picture of President Bashar al-Assad on its rear windshield. He’d arranged this meeting and we’d followed him here, along the Euphrates. Beside us, the distinguished Bedouin from Sheikh Fayez al-Ghubein’s home parked his blue car. Antranig continued driving and shut off the engine in front of a modest, single-story house. A religious event, I thought, related to the mosque nearby. Nervous about my meeting, I smoothed my hair and began to fret: Would his family like me? Would I make it past tea? I expected a great-great-grandson, a wife, a child or two, a reception that would last about an hour.Īs we rounded a bend of mooing cows, I spotted a crowd of some three hundred people. Coughing, I closed my window as a whirl of concrete homes, cornfields, and flocks of sheep sped past outside.

Only minutes earlier, we’d turned off the main highway through a canopy of landscaped trees, and we were already deep in the tiny village around Deir Zor, the onetime home of Sheikh Hammud al-Aekleh. The ruts on this dirt road were too deep for our tires. Our car was kicking up dust, rocking from side to side. Some members of the family that greeted her in 2007 today are Syrian refugees themselves. The following is a chapter from MacKeen’s book recounting how she finally meets the descendants of Sheikh Hammud al-Aekleh, whose family welcomed in her grandfather, saving his life. With his journals guiding her, she grows ever closer to the man she barely knew as a child. Inspired to retrace his steps, she sets out alone to Turkey and Syria, shadowing her resourceful, resilient grandfather across a landscape still rife with tension. Reading this rare firsthand account, his granddaughter Dawn MacKeen finds herself first drawn into the colorful bazaars before the war and then into the horrors Stepan later endured. The Hundred-Year Walk – An Armenian Odyssey(2016) alternates between Stepan’s saga and another journey that takes place a century later, after his family discovers his long-lost journals.

A hundred year walk