On a week-long visit to Syria - during which I explored the Old City of
Damascus, the Silk Road bazaars of Aleppo and the ruins of ancient Palmyra -
welcomes seemed to erupt from every quarter. No matter where I was in this
ancient nation with its Bronze Age, Classical, Biblical and Islamic history, and
whoever I encountered, local greetings were never long in coming.
Though most westerners might be wary of staying in a country whose authoritarian
government stands accused of some serious charges - financing Hezbollah,
allowing foreign fighters into neighbouring Iraq and assassinating the former
Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri - a week among the regular citizens of
Syria and seeing the country's cultural riches is an eye-opening experience.
When I boarded the plane, I knew only that Damascus claimed to be the oldest
inhabited city on earth and that some favourite writers - Mark Twain, Gustave
Flaubert, Agatha Christie - had been swept away by the country's lore-filled
past and landscapes.
Many people told me vaguely to be careful, though none had ever been to Syria.
My few acquaintances who had braved the country despite its reputation assured
me that all would be fine. Head immediately to the legendary Umayyad Mosque in
Damascus, they said. Fill up whenever you can on excellent grilled lamb, baba
ghanouj and pomegranate juice. And leave your preconceptions at passport
control.
The country I discovered, in addition to being friendly and largely free of
crime and related hassles, even showed glimmers of opening to the West after
decades of closure. Under its London-educated, 41-year-old president, Bashar
al-Assad, Syria has instituted private banking, removed a number of
long-standing import barriers and passed measures allowing foreigners to own
property. A Four Seasons Hotel opened in Damascus with great fanfare in 2005; a
five-star Inter-Continental is under construction.
"Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus,"
wrote Twain, who visited the city in the 1860s. "To Damascus, years are only
flitting trifles of time. She measures time not by days and months and years,
but by the empires she has seen rise and crumble to ruin. She is a type of
immortality."
He was scarcely embellishing. The Babylonians blasted through Syria under
Nebuchadnezzar, before the Persians did likewise under Darius and Xerxes. The
Romans captured the country in 63BC, and Mark Antony campaigned there against
the Parthians.
It was on the road to Damascus, most famously, that the Jewish traveller Saul
was blinded by the light, initiating his conversion to Christianity and a new
identity as the apostle Paul.
And it was on the road to Damascus, six centuries later, that the Prophet
Muhammad stopped in his tracks and refused to enter the city, saying that "man
should only enter paradise once". In succeeding centuries, the Egyptians,
Ottomans and French all took their turns as occupiers, before Syria became
independent in 1946.
Today, the route to the inner sanctum of the eighth-century Umayyad Mosque - the
spiritual and historical heart of the Old City - seems culled from some
time-worn star map. First you cross under the Roman archway, just south of the
tomb of the fabled Islamic warrior Saladin, who fought Richard the Lionheart
during the Crusades. Then you enter the vast gates of the mosque, whose stony
expanses rest atop a former Byzantine church, which overlays a mostly vanished
Roman temple to Jupiter, itself erected on the site of a former Aramaean shrine.
Finally, you make a quick jog across the courtyard, past the mausoleum of John
the Baptist and into the tomb of Hussein, a grandson of Muhammad and a martyr
venerated by Shiite Muslims.
The afternoon I visited, the stone room echoed with clicking prayer beads,
muttered verses from the Koran and sobs. Men prostrated themselves, pressing
their foreheads to the stone. Student-aged girls and toothless, wizened old
women in black veils wept openly. One bespectacled young woman cried
uncontrollably, grabbing at the walls.
Places of powerful faith fill every corner of Damascus. In a small, silent
street in the Christian Quarter of the Old City I tracked down the Church of
Ananias, the man who cured St Paul of his blindness and baptised him into
Christianity. Though empty of worshippers, some handwritten notes and trinkets
from visitors were stuck between the stones.
Utterly different again, and equally haunting, was the reconstructed ancient
Jewish synagogue in the National Museum, an evocative time capsule of relics
from forgotten Bronze Age cities, vanished Roman outposts and other Ozymandian
monuments pulled from Syria's sands.
Nearby, the lanes of the Old City brimmed with energy. Twilight evoked a certain
wistfulness. As the final call to prayer echoed through the blue-black evening,
strolling couples and families filled the paved lanes around the mosque. In the
cafés, old men in threadbare suits sipped Turkish coffee and chatted.
I wiled away more than a few nights, smoking narghiles, as water pipes are
called there, and drinking mint tea at the old-world Al Nafoorah coffeehouse -
just off the south-east corner of the Umayyad Mosque - as the nightly pageantry
of Damascus flowed past. It was the perfect place to meditate on the city.
To see the most famous of Syria's crumbling cities, Palmyra, I set out at dawn.
The bus rolled across the arid emptiness, past loping camels, goatherds in
chequered headdresses, and Bedouin nomads' tents. Finally, three hours later,
the majestic, blocky ruins emerged.
Here, in Syria's largest oasis, an ancient Silk Road trade centre flourished
some two millennia ago. Surveying the landscape then, you would have seen a
thriving market city, echoing with talk in Aramaic and filled with arriving
camel trains bearing goods such as dried foods, spices, perfume, ivory and silk
from as far away as India and China. From Palmyra the exotic goods would be
shipped westward to Rome - which for a time controlled Palmyra - where they
fetched up to 100 times their original cost.
The miles of stony passages and thousands of shops in the souks of Aleppo,
another Silk Road stop that's now Syria's second-largest city, briskly destroy
flimsy descriptions such as "diverse" or "eclectic". These hollow words splinter
under the tonnage of kaftans, coffee beans, lutes, Teletubbies, silk cushions,
mosaics, perfumes, gold, carpets, gumdrops and olive-oil soaps.
Dodging mule carts and old men chewing pistachios - a local speciality - I moved
with the thick crowds past ornate Ottoman-era stone warehouses and the
eighth-century Great Mosque, resting place of the head of Zachariah, the father
of John the Baptist. Time seemed barely to exist.
The stone arches, massive wooden portals and iron-barred windows appeared
unchanged since their construction in the Middle Ages.
And today, the only real signs of 21st-century life were the schoolgirls
sporting Barbie backpacks who were milling about the battlements of the
storybook medieval citadel, and the screaming schoolboys fighting unseen
invaders.
Back in the Old City of Damascus, midnight settled on the Christian Quarter and
a slow-moving line of black 4x4s and silver Audis cruised slowly down the
Roman-era Straight Street, depositing the well-heeled and the high-heeled at
trendy new bars and restaurants tucked in the surrounding labyrinthine lanes.
Famous as the place where Saul received his baptism and was christened Paul,
"the street called Straight" (as it's referred to in the Bible) and its environs
are once again witnessing some astonishing conversions, as young, enterprising
Syrians transform old-world buildings into 21st-century clubs, clothes shops and
stylish small hotels.
"You can see renovation everywhere," said Amjad Malki, a co-owner of the jet-set
Villa Moda fashion boutique, as we dined on grilled meats and excellent mezze
dishes at the stylish Al-Khawali restaurant. In what was a 17th-century stone
stable, Malki's shop has swapped hay and oats for Prada handbags, Jimmy Choo
shoes and Dolce & Gabbana leopard-print bikinis.
"People are buying and prices have tripled," Malki says, ticking off a list of
hotspots such as Leila's Restaurant and the Talisman Hotel in the city. "It's
the place to be."
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