Baghdad at once reflects the rapid changes taking place in the period of the late Ottoman Empire and the immutable character of the ancient land between rivers. In her original article on the diaries, Margaret Makiya writes that Joseph's life "covers almost exactly the period of 'Victorian Baghdad' if we may use such a term, and the diaries reveal as much about himself and the generation to which he belonged as they do about the great empire and society through which he moved.". The Alexander Richard Svoboda Travel Journal In 1897, at the age of nineteen, Joseph's son Alexander journeyed across the Middle East and Europe, keeping a journal as he went. Traveling from his frontier province of Baghdad to the modern metropolis of Paris, Alexander records his impressions of a rapidly modernizing landscape as he encounters it for the first time, provides a fresh commentary on the great changes of his day and the particularity of Baghdad's place in that world. Written in Arabic, the journal was translated by Nowf Allawi and published in collaboration with Newbook Digital Texts in 2013. In his introduction to the Newbook publication, Professor Walter G. Andrews notes that as a young Baghdadi of European heritage, "Alexander represents a microcosm of the interplay and conflicts of values and traditions that marked the Middle East of his day," giving him a unique perspective for this historical moment at the turn of the 20th century. Project History Alexander Svoboda moved from Baghdad to Istanbul in 1929, leaving the diaries with a local Catholic priest. The diaries were eventually passed on to Iraqi historian Yaqub Sarkis, who left his library as a private bequest to Al-Hikma University. In the 1970s, Margaret Makiya became interested in the diaries as "a social document of a particular fragment of Iraqi society in the second half of the nineteenth century," and obtained a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation to study and transcribe their contents. Makiya transcribed 31 of the 61 diaries, and her work continues to serve as essential source material for the Svoboda Project. In 1985, Professor Henry Svoboda, the last member of the Svoboda family remaining in Iraq, employed researcher and architect Nowf Allawi to assist in writing a family history using material from Joseph Svoboda's diaries. In 2005 the two began work on a translation of Alexander Svoboda's travel journal, but Professor Svoboda's death in October 2005 and