Photo exhibition of German traveler in Taiz [Archives:2006/928/Local News]

TAIZ ) An exhibition of historical sites photos shot by the German globetrotter Hermann Burchardt was held at Al-Saeed Cultural Foundation in Taiz city Wednesday 8 March 2006. The photos record the period of 1900-1909 when the German globetrotter Burchardt had visited Yemeni areas and took photos of historical fortresses and mosques, in addition to some natural landscapes.

The German traveler had also written many remarks on habits and traditions of that time inside the Yemeni society. His tragic end was when he was attacked by highwaymen who killed him in the area of Udain, the governorate of Ibb on 19 December 1909. After around one-hundred years of his trip, the Yemenis wanted this exhibition to be a gesture of appreciation and consideration for the traveler and to apologize to his family and all the fair orientalists and to extol his human role through which at that time he had tried convey to the world and his country the suffering of the Yemenis under the Ottoman rule that stabilized backwardness in the Yemeni society from which they are suffering until now.

The German globetrotter Hermann Burchardt was born in Berlin in 1857 to a bourgeois family. Because of his great interest in the orient, he had studied eastern languages at Berlin University. There he had learned the Arabic and Turkish languages. He had made many research trips to Syria, East Africa, Mesopotamia, Persia and Central Asia, as well as to Yemen. He had visited Yemen three times, the first was in 1900, then in 1907 and the third in 1909 when he had been killed.

He had documented his first trip in an article titled “Sketches” from my trip to Yemen which he had published in 1902 in the Berlin magazine of Earth Sciences.
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