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On this day, in 1929, Oleg Grabar was born in Strasbourg, France. Today would have been his 92nd birthday.

The son of eminent Byzantinist André Grabar, he attended the University of Paris and Harvard, earning diplomas in medieval and modern history. In 1955, he earned his doctorate from Princeton in Oriental languages and literatures. Although his interests later widened to include the Islamic world beyond the Middle East, Grabar first specialized in the art and architecture of the Umayyad dynasty (7th–8th-centuries). 

Grabar began his professional career at the University of Michigan, where he taught from 1954 to 1969. U-M was the first American institution to create a position for an Islamic art historian, and was unique in the United States at that time in its commitment to the study of the Muslim world.

in 1956, Grabar accompanied then-chairman of U-M’s History of Art Department George Forsyth (later director of the Kelsey Museum) on a trip through Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Libya, and the Sinai Peninsula. Their goal was to identify an Islamic site to excavate. They settled on Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, also known as Qasr al-Hayr East, an Umayyad-period urban settlement located in the semiarid Syrian steppe. Between 1964 and 1971, with the support of the Kelsey Museum, Grabar directed a large-scale archaeological excavation at the site. Drawn to the remote 8th-century complex in the hopes of uncovering a princely Umayyad palace, Grabar and his team instead stumbled upon a new type of urban settlement. A rich lifeworld emerged in the midst of their discoveries, and over the course of the excavation’s six seasons, close relationships formed between the American and Syrian archaeologists, historians, and workers who labored and lived at the site.

A new Kelsey Museum publication examines the six seasons of excavation at Qasr al-Hayr. Co-authored by U-M professor of art history Christiane Gruber and graduate student Michelle Al-Ferzly, City in the Desert, Revisited features previously unpublished documents and over 80 black and white and color photographs from the Qasr al-Hayr dig and recounts the personal experiences and professional endeavors that shaped the fields of Islamic archaeology, art, and architectural history during their rise in the U.S. academy. Grabar remembered his time at Qasr al-Hayr fondly, writing: 

When I visited Damascus, Palmyra, and Qasr al-Hayr in April 1964 in order to organize the expedition planned for the Fall, I did not imagine that so many individuals would become involved in the work over the course of the next fourteen years. Nor did I realize in the crowded bus taking me back, on the eve of Easter, from Homs to Damascus, that, from the black tents of the Syrian steppes to the austere rooms of Damascus officials or to the institutions as far west as San Francisco, there would be men and women whose lives, affections, and memories share a few weeks or months of unbelievably concentrated energy devoted to Qasr al-Hayr. My gratitude to them extends much beyond the ideas they had or the work they did, both work and ideas being by now processed into a frozen book. For all of them taught me something of the joys and pleasure to be had from collective work and I hope all of them feel richer for it, as I do.

— Oleg Grabar, in the official excavation monograph, City in the Desert, p. ix.

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• City in the Desert, Revisited: Oleg Grabar at Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, 1964–71, by Christiane Gruber and Michelle Al-Ferzly, with a foreword by Renata Holod
• Kelsey Museum Publications 17
• Ann Arbor: Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, 2021
• ISBN: 978-1-7330504-0-1
• Pp. xviii + 166, 30 color and 52 b/w photographs
• Paperback, 8″ x 8″
• $35.00

Available for purchase through ISD.

An interactive PDF of the book is available for free download through the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology website.