“There are some things that bombs and fighting just can’t kill.”

A soft spring sunlight floods the ruined bedroom of Mr Anis, a seventy year old Syrian who refused to leave Aleppo through four years of bitter fighting. The Syrian civil war is now on the brink of entering its seventh year. It is far from over. In the midst of the rubble and dust of his family home, he sits on the edge of his bed, pipe in hand and legs crossed, listening to a his favourite Syrian singer on his wind-up record player.

Joseph Eid was born in Beirut in 1976, and after finishing his undergraduate studies in Political Science, History and Photography in 2002, worked as a writer and reporter with the Lebanese Broadcast Corporation International. In 2006 he joined the Agence France Press photo department where he was assigned to Baghdad as picture desk editor until 2008. Since 2009 he has been working as AFP's photo-coordinator and photographer for Lebanon, Syria and Jordan.

This poignant portrait taken by Eid, has the mood of a renaissance painting and sums up, not just the destruction of Aleppo in Syria’s brutal civil war, but also the determination of the Syrian people to not give up, despite their calamitous circumstances.

Mr Anis was first interviewed in a moving story in 2016, when he was living in an ISIS controlled neighbourhood of the city. Before the war he had been an enthusiastic collector of vintage cars. At one point he had 30, but as the conflict progressed and territory swapped hands between the government and rebels his collection was decimated.

Joseph Eid recently returned to the city to document how Mr Anis was coping in the ruins of the city that had once been known as ‘the Jewel of Syria’. 

After being directed to his home by locals, he found that one third of his prized cars had been stolen or destroyed in the recent fighting. Mr Anis showed them around his ruined home – quite literally a pile of rubble. Much of what he had treasured – from his beloved collection of vintage American cars, to his trusty pipe – today is destroyed. The only thing around him that still works is his old hand-wound gramophone – which doesn’t need the unreliable electricity supply to operate – one of the things that brings him joy each day. Lighting his pipe, he plays traditional Syrian songs by one of his favourite singers, Mohamed Dia al-Din.

“Mr Anis is emotionally involved with his past and to the things that he always cherished. Without them he would lose his identity,” Eid told Time. “Which is why he insists on staying in Aleppo and getting back his life again. Whenever I feel any kind of despair or surrender to life’s problems I always recall Mr Anis smoking his pipe while sitting on his rubble covered broken bed and listening to his favourite music."