Category: photo

So often in travel (and perhaps in life) you set out to do one thing, and end up discovering something else en route, an experience that ends up overshadowing your original plan. Travel at its best is often this way, when sightseeing plans end up acting as a mere framework for you to have a genuine cultural experience, the kind that cannot be planned on an itinerary.

Finding ourselves on the coastal town of Tartus (former Tortosa, city of the Knights Templar–please refer to other post) with a morning at our disposal, we set out for the ancient Phoenician ruins of Amrit a few kilometers south. The Phoenicians, in the centuries before Christ, dominated the Levant and controlled cities all over the Mediterranean. While their other cities, including Arwad, an island just off the coast of Tartus and the final base of the Crusaders, were subsequently inhabited and redeveloped by other civilizations, Amrit remained a ruin after the Phoenicians’ departure, providing a more time capsule-like view into their culture. I knew that Amrit was more of a religious center than a great city, and that the ruins remaining are few and scattered, but I was curious to see the site from having always seen mention of the Phoenicians in history books and atlases, but not knowing much about them (perhaps because, despite their great seafaring prowess and wide distribution, they, unlike the Romans, the Greeks or the Persians, do not remain as a nation).

We negotiated with a taxi driver to take us to Amrit, and thought that we were on track as we headed south on the coastal road out of Tartus–but much more quickly than I expected we ended up at a dead-end, a roundabout terminating in a military base. The driver stopped the car to inquire directions of the soldiers. Now, I had read in guidebooks that the ruins of Amrit are mixed in with military installations, which makes access to some of the ruins impossible and photography problematic, but I had not thought that we would run into soldiers before we got to any of the ruins. But no problem–the soldiers were friendly and a particularly well-built one, fresh from swimming or diving in a wetsuit that was now half off, instructed us in his hearty voice to proceed on foot through the military area. A local farmer (?) who happened to be nearby set off with us, and we bid our taxi farewell.

After the first few hundred meters, it became clear that the driver had taken the wrong road, but having faith in the soldier who said that the ruins were reachable by foot, we proceeded forward with our non-English speaking impromptu guide. He briefly stopped to point out to us a giant sarcophagus dug out in a trench, and we knew we were on the right track. Soon we came to a dirt road and a sign and within sight of the ruins of the main temple complex. We bid our farmer goodbye (with baksheesh, or tip) and walked toward the temple, which we had read was dedicated to a local god who was something like Hercules. Built from the sixth century BC, and in active use for centuries afterward, it consisted of a small central shrine within a large compound which is said to have been flooded. Nearby was a extremely long and skinny (230x30m) largely rock-cut stadium, presumably used for very narrow games (running?) and according to tourist literature able to seat over 10,000 spectators.

Central shrine, or cella, of temple

Stadium (note person on left for scale)

From there the real adventure began. The next sites to the south were monumental towers erected over burial chambers, but we didn’t know how to get there. There were some unpaved roads running alongside the temple ruins, yes, but it was not entirely clear whether they would lead to the next set of ruins, and whether cutting through the trees might provide quicker, more shaded access for those traveling by foot. Armed with my vague map, we headed due south. In part because they are tall, the towers were pretty easy to find. One had an unusual cylindrical shape, with odd ornamentation, and each had a surprising number of niches for bodies underneath.

Towers (note person on left tower for scale)

There, we met there a tour guide who was taking an elderly Swiss couple around the ruins. He offered us a ride back to town, but we thanked him and told him that we wanted to explore more of Amrit, including a third, shorter hulking tower nearby. The guide warned us that we were venturing too close to active military areas, jokingly saying that as Americans we would have our hands chopped off if we were caught in the wrong place. Of course, we knew no such thing would happen to us, but Syria being something of a police state (related post to come), we were unsure how cautious we should really be. When we told the guide that we would risk it, he more strongly counseled us against.

We wanted to see the third tower, but also didn’t want to risk detention or arrest–and so we decided to sneak up to the third tower via a circuitous path, which also allowed us first to chat with some picnicking Syrian college students (and pose for the obligatory “photos with foreigners” shoot). As we got closer, it was clear that the tower itself acted as part of a barrier to a small compound that was delineated by barbed wire. About fifty meters from the tower were two large artillery guns, and some slowly spinning radars, and I could see one soldier walking about. We got a little closer, but did not risk lingering or taking photographs (though I think the soldier near the gun must have seen us, and didn’t care that we were poking around.)

We continued on, to see a large cubic mausoleum mentioned in my guide. Although we were not quite sure whether the next fence we encountered meant we were inside or outside of a restricted area, we saw a large road nearby and so figured that we were either out of the military base or at least out of the areas closed to the public. The bigger problem was that I didn’t know how to get to the site, which I knew was about a kilometer away. Trees blocked our sight and the trails that there were were curvy and indirect. We walked about, through fields and roads, asking directions when we could but not getting much useful information (I tried in Arabic the name of the site, the word for tower and the word for cube, and a number of hand gestures to indicate what we were looking for–all to no avail).

Just when we had come upon a man who spoke some English and seemingly confidently pointed us in the right direction, we came upon the bedouins.

Now, bedouins are all over the Arab world. We have met bedouins in the deserts of Oman, and been invited to sit with them and drink cardamon-flavored coffee (they are, of course, famous for their hospitality, even among the general Arab population). But seeing Bedouins on the green Syrian coast felt strange because we were not in the wilderness, not in the desert which intuitively seems the bedouins’ natural domain. Also, this experience was new because the group that we ran into was doing something that we knew bedouins to do, but something we had not seen them doing: moving. It being the twenty-first century, the family was using a large flatbed truck, not camels or other pack animals, but their belongings were much the same as they would have been thousands of years ago–wooden poles for their tent home, canvas for the tent itself, large numbers of quilts and mats, kitchen implements and so forth. The younger men and women were unloading the truck, while children played about and the leader of the group, an elderly man in traditional dress with well-weathered skin, directed.

We lingered to see this ritual, and tried to communicate with the old man, who was quite friendly. There were so many questions
we wanted to ask, though of course we had no language in common: How often do you move each year? Do you go to the same places? How many of you live together? Doesn’t this land belong to somebody? We didn’t get the answers to these questions, but got some descriptions of the family relationships among the people present, and the (obvious) answer to perhaps my biggest question: Why still nomadic? The answer was in the form of hundreds of bleating sheep, lambs, goats and kids. Herded by mule and teenage boys, they crowded the field nearby, walking and grazing packed tight together, some looking wise and old, others mere nursing infants. The bedouin were moving for the same reason they always have–to find pasture for their flock.

It’s strange to see such historical continuity. We often think of the nomadic life as something of the past, a stage that humans went through on the way to life on farms and in cities. It becomes somewhat comprehensible in some extreme places, like the deserts of Arabia or the mountains of Central Asia, where cultivation, or year-round habitation, for climatic reasons, is not feasible. But it seems like a pattern that should not hold out, that whenever possible should give way to sedentary life. But here the bedouin were, mere hours by car from the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities. The bedouins’ ancestors, for hundreds and thousands of years, had rubbed shoulders and traded, shared much the same space, as urbanized people.

In theory, to my biased mind, it seems unlikely–but it is a historical fact, and one of the things that make this part of world so unique. With the fertile coast and river valleys lying so close to desert and emptiness, it is a boundary between two worlds. In the case of the bedouin, it’s the boundary between the urban Mediterranean world and the Arabian desert, where nomads in tents and rich merchants in opulent homes have coexisted. [An old map I saw in an exhibit in Aleppo showed a bedouin encampment outside of the eastern gate–that is of course the direction they would arrive from, the direction of the desert. We found that near that gate still sell good for bedouins, like tent poles stakes.] In other contexts, and at other times, Syria has lain between Egyptian and Hittite, Greco-Roman and Persian, Christian and Muslim, Mongol and Mamluk, and so on.

A family portrait

The lady of the house, tattooed (like in so many other “tribal” cultures)

After talking with the older man and taking pictures of his family (they were very patient with Derek), we walked over to the field to observe the animals. There, we were invited for tea with a man and two younger boys, boiled over a open fire.

One of these boys joined us in our quest for the final mausoleum. We had thought that a young boy would certainly have explored the area and know instantly what we wanted–but no such luck (perhaps asking a nomad for local monuments isn’t the best idea). We wandered with the children (for at times others joined us) for almost an hour, finding some other minor ruins but not the mausoleum, even scouting fruitlessly from the roof of an inhabited house. Eventually, we bid the children goodbye and searched alone. When we had almost given up, we ran into another rather muscular half-naked man on a motorcycle, this time tattooed and for some reason mostly covered with sand, who knew where the structure was and told us to get on his bike. We stopped a few minutes later, and he indicated that we should go through a break in the fence of an orchard on the side of the dirt road. (Coincidentally, this was the same orchard that Derek had “borrowed” a couple of oranges from about twenty minutes earlier, but did not go far enough to see the mausoleum.)

The men tending the orchard didn’t seem to mind our visit, and helped us pick fruit from the best of the many trees, before walking us toward the tall tower.

Mausoleum (note person for scale on right)

Before we began our trip, we downloaded from iTunes and watched a brief made-for-television program on some of the largest Crusader structures in Syria, including the Hospitaller fort of Krak des Chevaliers (post to come) and the Templar city of Tortosa (now Tartus). From this program we knew that Tartus existed as a modern Syrian city that has in part grown up within the ramparts of the old walled city, its Crusader remnants often visible through the more recent layers of construction. Even after seeing it on video, however, we were still not prepared for this merging of old and new.

Tartus was separately established as a city during the reign of Emperor Constantine in the 4th century, when it was distinguished from the older settlement on the island a few miles ashore, Arwad, which was an important city since at least Phoenician times. In the 7th century, the city was one of the conquests of the newly-Islamic Arabs, under whose control it remained until the Crusader invasion at the end of the 11th century. For most of the period from 1099 to 1291, the city was held by the Crusaders, with the Knights Templar assuming responsibility for the city in 1152. Saladin almost retook the city in 1188, but the Templars managed to hold on, and after Saladin’s departure reconstructed and fortified the city’s great cathedral, Our Lady of Tortosa, which was originally constructed in 1123.

Interior of Our Lady of Tortosa, now a museum

The fortification of the church was accompanied by enhanced fortifications of the walled city as well, which strong walls have survived encroaching homes over the last eight hundred years. Tortosa formed part of the series of defenses that ran along the Crusader-held coast and immediate hinterlands. Tortosa finally fell in 1292, after the Arabs had already conquered the great inland castles (post to come) and Tyre down the coast. Tortosa was the last Crusader hold on the mainland, although they would remain on offshore Arwad until 1302, purportedly to stage a renewed attack (which never took place, much like attacks on the Chinese mainland prepared on the island of Taiwan).

Of course, it’s perfectly natural in the course of the life of a city to build upon existing foundations, and this happens with almost every city. Buildings accumulate, and pieces of many eras are often on full simultaneous display. But this presentation, for reasons not quite clear to me, seems exaggerated at Tartus, where so much of the Crusader city layout (interior and exterior walls, moats) and pieces of several Crusader structures (donjon or keep, chapel) are, by their durable and distinctive masonry, easy to identify in the residential old city. For the most part, I think it speaks to the solidity of Crusader construction, and the lack of an organized effort by the inhabitants that followed to build competitive structures–most construction in the old city since Crusader times, it seems, has been relatively haphazard and minor, at times dismantling part of or building into the Crusader framework but never coming close to its permanence or scale. (The old city, of course, is only part of the story–most of the modern city of Tortosa lies outside the small enclosure of the city walls.)

Houses built into the Crusader chapel. In the documentary that we saw, I believe that these houses were occupied but they are now empty–a local man told us that the government has been gradually clearing (parts of?) the old city to be refurbished and maintained as a historical site and tourist attraction.

Houses built into the wall of what was once a vaulted hall.

Houses built into the exterior wall of the city. The inhabitants of Tartus have over the past 800 years superimposed their homes onto the foundations and blocks of the original wall–the moat is clearly discernible all around the exterior wall, as are the former towers.

A closeup of the wall. You can see the large Crusader blocks on the bottom, as well as older homes made of smaller blocks of stone and newer homes made of concrete.

Homes built into the interior wall. The street lies in the space between the interior and exterior (concentric) walls.

The wall of the city facing the sea. You can see the slope, or glacis, that was part of the defensive structure of the city.

By the time we arrived in Tartus, we had already seen several castles that we knew were once inhabited in this manner (castles that had villages spring up within their walls, which villages were later cleared), and so it was particularly interesting to see a contemporary example. Old Tartus is very much a living place, with clothes hanging to dry from windows, children playing in the narrow alleys and old men smoking nargileh in the town square.

Being an American has become, especially of late, a politically sensitive matter. I suppose this has been to a certain extent true for a while–any hegemon, by its ability to influence the course of events, is likely to have fans and detractors, and America has wielded superpower authority since at least World War II. Similarly, being European in the colonial age must have had its complications as well as conveniences, and the same for other ruling powers and their citizens in the span of time. But being American right now is particularly tricky; there is something of a global consensus that the U.S. government has abused its moral and military power, to embark on a series of misguided adventures that has endangered the world. These issues are at their most acute in the Arab world, which sees itself (and rightly so) as one of the principal targets of American militancy.

Fortunately, goodwill toward the U.S. has not totally worn, and people in Syria (and most other places we’ve been) are smart (or forgiving) enough to know that not all Americans support Bush and his policies. The response here to our stating that we’re American is universally “You are welcome,” with a heartfelt stress on “wel-come” as is the Syrian style. I may be imagining it, but I perceive that the locals want to make especially sure that we, as Americans, feel welcome, despite it all. People here (and around the world) still like and not dislike Americans (and infectious American culture). As one man put it, “Syrians love Americans. Everyone loves Americans.”

About two thirds of the time, our being American merits no special comment. But American tourists are relatively rare here, and sometimes there are some questions or comments. Often, people express, in one way or another, that while we are personally welcome, they disapprove of Bush and his policies. This gives us a chance to explain that we are in agreement with them, and look forward to the end of his presidency (this is actually fairly fun to gesticulate if the person we’re speaking to doesn’t speak English). If we have time, we explain how Bush is not only bad for Syria and the Arab world, but also for America, citing his environmental and tax policies, as well as Hurricane Katrina. Some people are also curious to hear what we think the prospects are for the next President. They want to know whether things will improve, under Hillary or Obama or McCain (when asked, they seem to prefer Hillary). U.S. policy affects the lives of people around the world, and Syrians are eager to have an insight into the U.S. domestic political process.

A fair number of times, people have asked us to tell Bush and other Americans what Syria is really like, that it is a safe place with good people. They have a sense of what our perception of the country is (mullahs and terrorists, or, perhaps as bad, complete ignorance), and want us to act as a witness to the truth (related post on “the real Syria” to come). Not even once yet in Syria have we faced hostility for being American.

[I should note that opinion in the Islamic Middle East is not totally uniform–one Kurd we met explained how he felt Bush to a liberator, a defender of freedom and a “brilliant and beautiful man.” He had similar feelings for Rumsfeld, Powell and Rice. I suppose I can see why some Kurds might have this perspective–but other Kurds we have met are of the same mind as the Syrian Arabs and us.]

One anecdote. We took a daytrip from Damascus to visit the convent at Sednaya (famous for an icon of the Virgin Mary that is revered by Christians and Muslims alike as a fertility shrine, but really is not very interesting). Having seen the church and icon, we were sitting outside a small bakery on the main road in town eating snacks (mini pizzas and small pies with meat–cheap, delicious and ubiquitous here), when a rather sturdily built man in his late thirties came out of a nearby store to greet us. He had the usual questions (where are we from, etc.) and asked us whether we had visited the church of St. Peter in town. When we said that we had not, he told us in his limited English to wait one minute, for he would take us. The minute stretched into ten, but we waited since we didn’t want to reject his kindness and I had read that the church was an interesting one, having been converted in Byzantine times from a Roman pagan building (a tomb?). Finally, he walked out of the store with a bicycle pump, which as the three of us strolled down the street he delivered at his modest home to his young son. Reaching the gate of the church, which was not far, he produced his ring of keys–it turned out that he was the custodian of several of the Greek Catholic churches in town (and without him we couldn’t have entered the church at all).

St. Peter’s of Sednaya is a functioning small church (10 meters square, 8 meters high), cubelike and austere. The doorway is partially blocked to require that worshippers bow as they enter.

We walked through the small church and went up to its roof via a set of narrow stairs. When we returned to the nave and rested in the pews, the custodian explained to us that he was from Iraq. He took out his UNHCR identification papers showing him to be a refugee in Syria, and explained that some of his other siblings were now in the U.S. Earlier, he had joked that my shoes resembled U.S. military shoes, but I had thought nothing of it–as it turns out, he was speaking from personal experience. With his limited English, he explained to us that he was an Iraqi Christian who fled Iraq after his young daughter was killed in the violence. It wasn’t clear from our conversation who was directly responsible, but it was clear that he blamed the U.S.–he couldn’t understand why the U.S. was there: Iraq was safe and secure under Saddam, including for religious minorities such as Christians, and then the U.S. came and destroyed it, causing death and chaos. From his point of view, the U.S. attack on Iraq didn’t make any sense at all, even as a religious war, which it seemed to us he thought it in part. He rolled up his sleeve to reveal a large tattoo of a cross on his forearm, and demonstrated how he showed it to the American soldiers who had mistreated him and his family, saying “I am a Christian–Why are you doing this to me?” Halfway into our conversation, he broke into tears.

I had been afraid of meeting my first Iraqi. I know, I may very well have unknowingly met Iraqis while living in New York, but somehow the consolation of living in the U.S. would seem to provide some compensation for the horrors that they must have faced from the war of our causing. Like so many immigrants before them, coming to America would provide a new start with fresh hope and opportunity. But here I was faced with a sobbing man who had lost a child, and was living not in his home in Baghdad but in a small Syrian village, feeding his family on what must be a meager income from the church and no doubt feeling in limbo, his life completely turned on its head. This is the freedom we brought to many hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of Iraqis, and no doubt, he and his family were luckier than many others that were forced to flee or chose to stay.

In our shame, we didn’t know how to respond. We suggested that things could improve with a new president in the U.S. But, as he pointed out, it would make no difference to him–it was far too late. And perhaps it is too late for Iraq as well–the U.S. broke something that it cannot put back together again. We offered consolation and sympathy, and in the end left no doubt of our regret on a personal level for the faults of our nation. As much as Syrians may disassociate individual Americans from the Bush administration’s policies, we knew that living in a free democracy, the American people were largely to blame.

What I imagined as a child and young man, then came to the false realization that didn’t exist, thrives in the heart of the Middle East. Old Damascus came to us as something of a revelation, not one as life- and world-altering as that had by my biblical namesake here, but still something that will change the way I view the world, as travel to somewhere so different and exciting, the discovery of something you did not previously know to exist, can. As a man on the street predicted with confidence on our first day in Damascus, “You will love it, and you will return.”

Alley scene in the old city

The sheer scale of the old city (the walls run for more than five kilometers), its historical continuity (the center of town has been occupied by a place of worship for over three thousand years, including a Roman temple, a Christian church and now the Umayyad Mosque–post to come) and its historical preservation (Roman streets are identifiable, including Straight Street which is mentioned by name in the bible, and the great majority of the old city lies in its medieval layout, with a minimum of truly modern architecture to distract the eyes)–each impresses the visitor. Here is not only a city that has persisted through the centuries, but a truly great city that has prospered through many empires. At the crossroads of the world, Damascus was the site of some of the most important events in history (and in the middle of some of its greatest conflicts), yet comes to us not as a museum piece but as a living city–bits and pieces destroyed and rebuilt, inhabited (it is really much too large not to be inhabited) and noisy with commerce.

Roman sarcophagus, National Museum

Cafe, old city

The greatest impression to us, coming from India, and despite our stop in the squeaky modern United Arab Emirates, was a real sense of civilization, fitting for one of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities: a sophistication in people’s behavior and lifestyle that is not present in South Asia (despite the wealth of Bombay’s elite and the richness of Indian culture, there is always the feeling that you are ten meters away from abject poverty and life at its rawest and most base) or the (overly nouveau riche) Gulf; restaurants and cafes the atmosphere and cuisine of which any world city would envy (extravagant yet tastefully so, elegant yet cheerful, and making full use of the city’s architectural endowments); and a timelessness in the dark narrow alleys and historical monuments that could come only from accumulation through the centuries, as empires and nations deposited their structures, people and ideas within the city’s walls.

Coffeeshop sign, old city

Children, walking among Roman arch east of Umayyad Mosque

This sense of civilization is nowhere more alive in Damascus than in its courtyard houses, or baits. Originally built by local merchants or governors during the Ottoman Empire, seemingly countless mansions exist throughout the old city and fully display the artistry and incredible wealth of the town. [Although not remembering that it was from Damascus, I have long lusted after the “Nur al-Din room” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which you may have seen. It is not known from which house it Damascus it was removed.] Many of these houses are open, one way or another, to visitors, and in this post I will briefly describe four such houses, to give you a sense of Damascus today.

Tiled wall facing courtyard of Dar Anbar, former home of a rich Jewish merchant

Ceiling detail, Bait Quwatli

Antique Door. Antique Door is one of many restaurants converted from old courtyard homes (especially prevalent in the Christian quarter of the old city). Not the fanciest we saw, but still impressive, it is packed with customers each night, especially young people playing cards or backgammon while smoking an apple tobacco nargileh (post on the nargileh/hookah/sheesha hopefully to come). Syria, while not a rich country, is not an impoverished one either, and many people, at least in the big cities, have the disposable income necessary to enjoy a moderately priced evening out. The food at these restaurants is terrific, and a bargain at around SYR 600 (around $12) for an ample dinner for two, considering the stately and jovial ambience that could not be purchased at any price in most cities in the world.

Evening at Antique Door

Bait Farhi. One of the most striking things while walking through Damascus is the amount of construction that is going on. It almost feels like every large house is undergoing restoration, often to be turned into a hotel or a restaurant. Many hotels have opened in the old city in the last year or two, and many more are due to open in the years to come. By chance we walked by one of the most ambitious projects, the renovation and outfitting of Bait Farhi, an old home in the Jewish quarter, into a boutique hotel to be called Pasha Palace. Shirley Dyksmo, a Dutch-French interior decorator who together with her Syrian-French architect husband is heading up the project, personally gave us a generous tour, revealing the beauty of the house and its potential as a (fabulous) boutique hotel. Ms. Dyksmo explained that they are doing almost all the work in-house, having hired entire teams of craftsmen (over fifty in all) to painstakingly restore artistic details. Over the years (presumably as the fortunes of the Farhi family waned), the house had been carved up into over a dozen small apartments, with cinder block walls added to break up the large rooms and the beautiful walls and ceilings covered up with layers of paint and dirt. They are hoping to open the hotel next year, and for sure we will try to stay there on our next visit to Damascus.

Constructing missing molding, based on remaining pieces

Construction scene, main courtyard of the house

Ceiling, after restoration (this room also features a fountain)

Hebrew detail

Dahdah Palace. A stop for tourists for dozens of years, Dahdah Palace remains home to Mr. Dahdah’s wife and children (the monsieur having passed away). We knew of the beauty of the home from a book, but didn’t quite know how to visit it–and so we did what is customary for these listed homes in Damascus, which is to show up and see if entry is possible. Upon our ringing the bell, an elderly woman popped her head out of a window a half block away (these houses are big) and asked us to wait a few minutes. The lady, Mr. Dahdah’s widow, came down and started to give us a tour of the house in impeccable English. As it turns out, she was born in the United States, but moved to her family’s homeland of Lebanon before college due to an ailing grandparent. She and her husband had owned the house in Damascus for decades, and lived both there and in Lebanon. The facts were not what was most interesting, but her presentation. Not only was her accent and speech elegant, but the lady had in her diction and manners all of the elegance of a time past. You could imagine the sophistication of cosmopo
litan Lebanon when she was a young adult, and feel in the presence of a grace that is no longer easy to come by. She was much proud of the fact that her house remained a true residence rather than a restaurant or hotel (“I’ll never sell it”), and that the house was renovated when artisans still possessed traditional skills (she thought that some the recent renovations were not being done properly, although she did note the very high budget of the Pasha Palace project).

Lamp and decorative stone inlay facing courtyard, Dahdah Palace

But of course to maintain a home such as Dahdah Palace takes a large amount of money, and the house was not in the same condition as the homes that have been converted to commercial use. When we attempted to take a picture of one of the walls of the house, which had peeling paint, the lady requested with a mixture of pride and underlying regret, “Don’t take a picture of that–it’s not so pretty.” Although it seemed to us that the paint had been peeling for a while, she explained that premature rains the previous year had botched the annual paint job. She described with sadness the recent collapse of a large and beloved tree in the courtyard, a tree that was as much a part of the house as its walls, but caused much damage as it fell.

After discussing with her her history, the state of Damascus and our travel plans, she took us into one of the large rooms facing the courtyard, which was outfitted as a shop of Damascene crafts. In her gentle manner, she explained that her husband had run a crafts workshop and store when he was alive, and that the house was a true source of wonderful items. “Now we’re selling souvenirs for some money, that is what we’ve come to,” she sighed. She showed us a charming metal bowl for scooping bathing water, explaining how it was used. I was hesitant to buy any such item now since metal is heavy and we would be heading back through Damascus anyway, but our inspection of the item was cut off by her daughter, who arrived to take over the retail efforts. What a difference between mother and daughter! Lacking her mother’s charm and with the pushiness of a poor salesman, the daughter worked hard to clinch a sale, but the more she spoke the less I was interested in buying.

Nonetheless, it was charming to be acquainted with the lady of the house, and reassuring to see people holding on to their homes despite economic pressure–the old city of Damascus would of course not be the same if all of its homes were turned into hotels and restaurants to service tourists.

Geometric patterns in stone along floor, Bait Quwatli

Ceiling, Bait Quwatli

Mustafa Ali. Located near Bait Farhi in the Jewish quarter is the studio and gallery of Mustafa Ali, a Syrian sculptor. Having achieved acclaim for his work all over Europe and North America, Mustafa Ali relocated to the Jewish quarter of Damascus five years ago, filling the void left by the departed Jewish population (of which only 28 remain), who left their complicated lives in the Arab world for greener pastures in Israel and elsewhere. Mr. Ali’s aim is to create in the Jewish quarter an artistic neighborhood–a common pattern of gentrification but a plan for which many initially thought he was crazy. And it’s been successful–there are now dozens of artists in the Jewish quarter and the city has recognized its significance with an official designation. With hotels such as Pasha Palace and artists such as Mustafa Ali, a new life is being breathed into a neighborhood that had declined.

Mustafa Ali in his office