Updates
In Their Words: The Flying Carpet Festival’s Sahba Aminikia
Late last year, the Flying Carpet Festival was honored with an Aga Khan Music Award, given to organizations that display “exceptional creativity, promise, and enterprise in music performance, creation, education, preservation and revitalisation in societies across the world in which Muslims have a significant presence.” Founded in 2018, the Flying Carpet Festival is a traveling artist residency, or mobile festival, based in southeast Turkey but operating in many of that region’s conflict areas. Having first covered their work last year, The Ensemble recently spoke with Founder Sahba Aminikia about receiving the award, working in areas of conflict and displacement, and how he is learning and growing alongside the program.
Our Flying Carpet Festival Founder Among Winner Of Aga Khan Music Award 2025
We are deeply honored to share that our festival and its founder, Sahba Aminikia, have been selected as one of the winners of the 2025 Aga Khan Music Award "for visionary creativity in founding and guiding the Flying Carpet Festival, which draws on the transformative power of art and music to enrich the lives of children in conflict zones" - a recognition that belongs not only to us but to everyone who has walked alongside this journey of sound, hope, and magic, including artists, Sirkhane Social Circus School and our donors and supporters.
“Children have more imagination than we do”
Kulturaustausch - Circus and theatre for refugee children in the middle of a conflict-torn area? The Flying Carpet Festival on the Turkish-Syrian border makes the impossible possible
A Syrian Photographer’s Gift to Refugee Children
The New Yorker - After fleeing his native country for Turkey, Serbest Salih created a mobile darkroom and went on the road teaching kids to make pictures.
Artists Wow Children In Turkey With Lively Shows
Associated Press - In its third edition, the Flying Carpet Festival drew smiles on the faces of children from impoverished communities in southeast Turkey. The festival is a visual and musical spectacle performed by artists from around the world. With circus performances including acrobatics, juggling and stilt walking, organizers of the Flying Carpet Festival in Turkey always come prepared to entertain. In a recent event in the southeastern city of Mardin, performers regaled the children with a show featuring a giant puppet, followed by a music performance and tales told by a storyteller, among other segments.
Photos by children from Syria, Iraq and Turkey
The Washington Post - The concept of teaching children to make photographs in a workshop or some other place isn’t a new one (I’m thinking of “Born into Brothels” and “Kids with Cameras,” for example). But at least from what I have seen over the years, it always seems to be a fruitful one. The younger we are, the fewer preconceived notions we have. That makes for what I think is probably a more honest and free approach to creation.
‘Something magical happens’: the cameras helping refugee children to heal
Serbest Salih studied photography at college in Aleppo, before fleeing Syria with his family in 2014 as Islamic State fighters advanced on his home town of Kobani. He is now one of an estimated 100,000 refugees living in the historic city of Mardin in south-eastern Turkey, just a few miles from the Syrian border. Having initially found work as a photographer for a German NGO, Salih’s life changed dramatically in 2017 when, while wandering with a friend through the city, he discovered a sprawling refugee community living in a group of abandoned government buildings in the working-class Kurdish district of Istayson.
“It was a place where Turkish Kurds and Syrian Kurds lived as neighbours, but did not communicate,” he says, “They were strangers who spoke the same language. It was at that moment that I thought to use analogue photography as a means to integrate the different communities.”
A Balancing Act: Confronting Trauma and Conflict Through Circus
Harvard International Review - The Syrian civil war is a conflict that has killed hundreds of thousands of civilians and displaced millionsmore. Of those affected, over half are children. The majority of Syrian refugees have fled to neighboring countries, such as Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. Increasing a nation’s population by millions, seemingly overnight, places a tremendous strain on national resources. Turkey has bills in the billions for the expenditures necessary to support such a large refugee community. In The New Middle East, James Gelvin emphasizes that host countries do not just face the problem of finding a place for refugees to live; they also shoulder the costly burden of providing food, shelter, education, healthcare, protection, and municipal services. As a result of these social, economic, and infrastructural challenges, Saymaz’s stance is not an uncommon one. However, the argument that Syrian refugees have made Turkey a figurative “circus” is an opinion; that they have made it a literal circus is a fact.
Sirkhane Circus: Come One, Come All!
Is it possible to help vulnerable children deal with their struggles in a creative way? Can their trauma be transformed into something positive? Pinar has found a way... and it's inspired by the circus.
Çocuklu harikalar Sirkhane’si
Gönüllülük esasıyla projeler yürüten Her Yerde Sanat Derneği, Mardin’de yaşayan farklı dil, din ve kültürden çocukları sirk okulunda buluşturuyor.
SOCIAL CIRCUS BRINGS JOY TO CHILDREN IN NEED
Nothing brings a smile to a child’s face more quickly than watching the circus. Except, perhaps, being able to perform the feats themselves.
Sirkhane Social Circus School in Turkey trains refugee children from Syria in the art of circus performance as a way of bringing joy into a very difficult situation. A typical day of classes consists of children juggling, spinning multicolored plates, doing tricks on a trapeze and walking on stilts.
But the school is dedicated to more than just teaching practical skills. For the Syrian refugee children, circus arts have become a way of dealing with the trauma they have witnessed. They practice peace and harmony in a safe environment.
Located in an old house in Mardin, a city on the Turkish-Syrian border, the school serves students from Turkey, Afghanistan and Iraq as well as refugees from Syria. The children learn teamwork and form friendships with children from different backgrounds.
Turkey: Circus skills help Syrian refugee children overcome trauma
Al Jazeera - It is not uncommon for youngsters to dream of running away to join the circus. For Syrian refugee children in Turkey, they didn’t escape to the big top, but ran away from conflict. The Sirkhane Social Circus School offers circus and music workshops for children and young people, including refugees, to help them overcome trauma. Al Jazeera's Mohammed Jamjoom reports from Mardin in Turkey
Circus skills help Syrian refugee children to settle in Turkey
ReliefWeb - Laughter rings out and there is an atmosphere of excitement and joyful chaos. Children are perched on stilts, others spin plates or happily perform aerial dances.
This is not a big top circus in a major city but a house in southeastern Turkey, where Syrian refugee children learn circus tricks in an innovative programme to help integrate into their foreign host country.
The Her Yerde Sanat association (Turkish for "Art Anywhere") works with 120 young people aged three to 20.
Just north of the Syrian border, at the house in Mardin province, there is a beautiful view over the Mesopotamian plain to Syria, which 80 of the youngsters once called home. The other children are Turkish.
Art therapy for children affected by war...
VATAN - 012’den itibaren Mardin’de faaliyet gösteren “Her Yerde Sanat Derneği”, düzenlediği etkinliklerle savaştan kaçan çocukları hayata döndürüyor... Dernek, Sirkhane ve Uçan Kütüphane gibi projelerle bugüne dek 60 bin çocuğa ulaştı...
The Int'l Social Circus comes to Mardin province
Daily Sabah - Social Circus is described as "a growing movement toward the use of circus arts as a medium for social justice and social good."
It uses alternative pedagogical tools to work with youth who are marginalized or at social or personal risk. Sirkhane, the Social Circus School run by the Art Anywhere Association, is devoted to offering workshops on circus arts, painting and music to the war-affected children in Mardin. The fourth IM International Social Circus Festival, which will be held from Sept. 10-20, will bear the fruits of their labor as local, Syrian, Afghan and Yazidi refugee children will perform the skills they have acquired along with their trainers. Since 2011, Art Anywhere has organized a number of events, projects and workshops in and around Mardin, with the aim of benefitting the local community and especially its youth and children and providing them with the chance to gain skills while also socializing. Art Anywhere's events are held outside, are open to everyone and include parades, live music and circus acts in which loc a l crowds gather, creating a sense of community.