Violence of the Currency Crisis Violence of the Currency Crisis

I don’t know how Syrians are surviving.” People have been uttering this sentence for over two years. For over two years, the prices of goods and services have been growing, and the situation on the ground has been worsening. The answer to this sentence becomes more and more a mystery. This is about the crushing economic crisis unfolding in Syria today. The UN states that 90% of Syrians live below the poverty line. The situation sits at the kitchen table and touches people’s lives profoundly and relentlessly.

“Everyone could travel to the beach.” There is a constant reflection back to what was. So much has become inaccessible to the average Syrian, and the crisis has changed the behavior of most people and what is possible. Options shrink, as does the ability to live a satisfying life; it’s suffocating. Going to take a taxi ride or buy groceries, someone might flashback to when, for example, in May 2022, a kilo of meat was 22,500L instead of 140,000L today. A packet of eggs was 12,000L instead of 70,000L. Wages are not keeping up; they are far behind the cost of living. There’s a painful nostalgia about former values and the ease they allowed.

“I thought we had reached the bottom, and things couldn’t get any worse.” It’s incredible how periods of recent history become like golden ages relative to the present day. It’s still shocking to be spending a million lira for goods and services in a week when this amount equaled roughly 20,000 USD in 2011 and 792 USD in 2020 (20,000 USD and 333 USD in the black market, respectively). A million lira is worth 70 USD today. There is violence in expecting Syrians to carry on as usual with such a disparity in wages and costs of living and with such insurmountable challenges to daily living. There’s also violence in people watching the values of their savings and salaries turn to nothing.