“No nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
of travellers in some shady haunts
among Arabian Sands.”
Wordsworth
Perhaps we think of Syria as desert, with camels and the occasional palm tree – and its centre is indeed arid desert, strewn with tremendous ancient ruins. But wide areas, its “Fertile Crescent” from the Euphrates round to the Orontes valley, are richly green – the Muslim colour of heaven; with fruit trees – oranges, figs, cherries, mulberries, apricots, lemons, bananas, dates, almonds, walnuts; fields of wheat, barley, oats, potatoes – already being harvested in April – and everywhere, a wilderness of wild flowers.
We arrived in Damascus after a wearisome day waiting at airports. It seemed a crowded city full of traffic jams and a mixed Arab/European people. From my balcony I saw the sun go down behind the rocky high land bordering the city; the air alive with swallows, and stars appearing. Next morning we walked through the Roman West gate past the Al Arous minaret and along the ancient east-west highway – the Street called Straight – to the small Orthodox church to St Ananias, who healed St Paul of his blindness. I lit a candle. On, along the Street, through the Soukh [sadly – resisting temptation; I regret a large dark red carpet – the one that got away] to the Umayyad Mosque. Worship in this vast magnificent building has been Muslim for over a thousand years but under Roman and Byzantine rule Christianity prevailed, when a small shrine was built around the head of St John the Baptist. Sometimes the different beliefs seem to coalesce very naturally; when I was there I could hardly reach the shrine for a solid mass of black-veiled Muslim women, stroking the marble, weeping, dipping into the font for a drop of sacred water [perhaps drawn originally from the Abana river which flows through Damascus].
Many of the ancient sites we visited were out in the desert. Perhaps the most famous, Palmyra, dates back some 4,000 years to beginnings round an oasis on the Silk Road from China and India, and grew under the Assyrians, Arameans, Greek Seleucids, Romans and Byzantines….. Its most famous ruler, Queen Zenobia [around 260 – 280AD] built up a splendid empire under Roman rule but unwisely struck her own coins and was deposed [a story not unlike Boadicea’s 200 years earlier]. More familiar to us perhaps is Lady Hester Stanhope, niece of Pitt [the Younger] and fiancée of Sir John Moore [killed at Corunna]; she lived in state at Palmyra in the 1830s and “never stopped interfering in general Eastern political affairs” [according to my guide book]. Palmyra defies description; long colonnades of beautifully carved pillars, paved roadways, buildings often well excavated, nearly complete – theatres, temples to Baal, God of thunder and rain, and his brother El; large eerie underground family tombs with monuments, busts and statues silently lifelike.
It so happened that we were in Syria during the Orthodox Easter. On Maundy Thursday at St George’s Monastery, studying the unfamiliar saints on the iconostasis, I saw one of St George spearing not the usual dragon but a crowned old man – the devil – and carrying on his horse a small boy he had rescued from slavery, whilst the Princess stood in the right upper corner. As we left, the orthodox procession with a band [sounding rather like our village Church Lads Brigade] was arriving for Mass.
Perhaps the oldest city we visited was Ugarit, an important port on the Mediterranean which flourished some 4,000 BC. It was breathtaking from the sheer grandeur of its history; only partly excavated amongst the wild flowers, we could picture it as a busy crowded city of some 250,000 people at its zenith around 2,000 BC. Vast stocks of cuneiform tablets show that Sumerian-Accadian Ugarit had not only the earliest known alphabet but also a music system close to the system established by Pythagoras.
What is the magic in the word “Aleppo”? Shakespeare uses it – in Othello and Macbeth – and although today Aleppo has its shops, modern buildings, and a skyline bobble fringed with telly dishes, the charm is very strong. I marvelled at the Citadel, another vast and massive structure of stone; I drank fresh orange juice and bought tablecloths in the Soukh [from an urbane gentleman who suddenly erupted: “Bush! Blair!! But I think you will elect him again!!!” – almost the only political words I heard in Syria. But there is no doubt of the hostility towards Israel and America – “If only we can have peace with Israel we can make progress…..” We saw the Golan Heights still held by Israel and felt to be a continuing threat; we heard of a recent Israeli claim that Queen Zenobia of Palmyra was really Jewish [threatening Syrian’s tourism]. Over breakfast one day we heard of the arrest of an oil tanker laden with bombs and terrorists, captured at the Syrian border with Iraq. Tensions with the Lebanon were very real. Syria has few tourists this year – though not yet a return to the total collapse of tourism after 9/11. The old market squares, alleys and back streets of Aleppo stay in the memory.
Here and there came a disconcerting sense of recognition – the dark, jutting balcony windows where Muslim ladies could watch the world without being seen reminded me of Cordoba, Seville, Granada – brought to Spain from the Moorish world..
Krak des Chevaliers, which was home to Crusader Knights Hospitallers, again gave a sudden sense of familiarity – broken mullioned chapel windows, massive round keep, high battlemented walls – our very own Windsor Castle and many other strongholds built at the same time by the same people – Krak, which T.E. Lawrence called “the finest castle in the world”, gave a feeling of being back in Europe.
Bosra, the major city of the Nabatean Empire after Petra, is vivid in my memory not only for its ruined buildings – a vast theatre, temples, road grid, sewage system and bathhouses – but for the people still living there; goats, hens and cockerels scratching about among the rocks and flowers. Two ladies swathed in black, chatting in a doorway, invited us in to one ruined building – we looked in and found a lively mob of 5 year olds, eyes flashing in a tumult of giggles as they counted 1 to 10 for us in English – to the pride and joy of their young black-veiled teacher.
Whilst it is not unusual to see women’s faces out in the streets, many wear the burkha or a complete veil. We saw women eating in a restaurant draping their veils over the plate of food so as not to be seen eating. In Syria women can enter university, qualify and go out to work, but they would still wear a scarf to cover their hair, with long skirt and sleeves. We were told the system of “bride price” is still observed in Syria; and that most divorce cases give custody to the father.
Apamea, another ancient city fairly recently discovered, is thought to have had a central colonnade of fluted pillars, carved with Corinthian capitals, many with leaves other than acanthus, over a mile long. These beautifully finished stones, so perfectly fitted together, gave an overwhelming sense of the strength and grandeur of the social order which could produce such monuments – the work of thousands of skilful people, many of them slaves, who were able to leave an enduring, anonymous mark of their presence. Apamea also has some of the finest mosaics I have ever seen, including a very beautiful scene of Adam naming the animals.”
Although I have had to leave out many of the places and people I remember in Syria, one more must be recorded – the church of St Thekla, an early Christian martyr in Maalula. In the church there we heard the Lord’s Prayer reverently spoke in Aramaic, the language that Jesus spoke.