WHY STARS HEAD FOR THE DESERT
by ADRIAN MOURBY

The Evening Standard (London)
May 6, 2005

In a whirlwind of sand

IN ANCIENT FOOTSTEPS

BY TOBY HARNDEN

In Aleppo’s Old Town the stench of slaughtered sheep heads competes
with the aromas of saffron and henna. Youths cajole a heavily laden
ass through twisting alleys. Christian merchants shout out gold prices
while the mournful voice of the muezzin calls Muslims to prayer.

Little has changed since the early Ottoman or even Mameluke period.
Men in keffiyehs and dishdashas clamour for freshly squeezed
pomegranate juice. Determined women negotiate crowds with jute bales
on their heads. Only the breakneck scootering gives a hint that this
is the 21st century. The few Western tourists are generally treated
with warmth and curiosity.

Aleppo’s souk is reputed to be the largest covered market in the
world. Its counterpart in Damascus has a corrugated roof riddled
with bullet holes from celebratory gunfire by Turks in Lawrence of
Arabia’s time. Shafts of sunlight shine through on the people below.

Travelling the length of Syria by vehicle is frustrating but
rewarding. The roads and cars are battered. Highways into the desert
can simply run out of Tarmac and the potholes are the size of hot
tubs. Signs are hilariously inadequate. One showed that the road to
Damascus was both straight ahead and right. It was actually left.

When things went wrong we relied on Syrian hospitality. Lost in Aleppo,
a man clambered into the car to guide us to our hotel. When the engine
cut out he cheerfully enlisted a group of enthusiastic locals to give
us a jump start. On another occasion we got caught up in an Armenian
funeral. Shopkeepers and passers-by gesticulated and shouted, helping
us to inch by. Syria has the personal touch everywhere.

In Aleppo, once the last stop on the Orient Express, we visited
the Baron Hotel, where the wood panels, leather armchairs and tiled
floors recall T E Lawrence’s stay in Room 202 during the Great War.
Beit Wakil, in Aleppo’s Christian quarter, where rooms open on to a
450-year-old courtyard, is Syria’s most romantic hotel.

The merchant city is dominated by a mediaeval moated citadel and
mulberry bushes on which silkworms produce their cocoons. There are
400-year-old soap factories where the traditional recipe of caustic
soda plus 14 barrels of water, 24 of olive oil and three of laurel
is still observed.

You won’t see McDonald’s or Coca-Cola, but juice bars and omelette
stalls abound. In Damascus, we sat by the fountain at the al-Khawali
restaurant, a merchant’s home built in 1368, and munched on kibbeh
minced lamb and borek cheese pastries as locals chatted and smoked
water pipes, or nargilehs.

The ubiquitous Stalinesque portraits of Bashar Assad and his late
father, Hafez, an air force officer who seized power in 1970 and died
in 2000, are a reminder that Syria is a Ba’athist dictatorship and
one of the world’s most repressive regimes. Only in Hama, renowned
for its creaking wooden water wheels or norias, did we get a glimpse
of what this might mean.

At the Azem Palace, Ahmed, our elderly guide, froze when I asked what
had happened to a rebuilt cupola. ‘I don’t know,’ he faltered. ‘It’s
new, yes. It must have been damaged. You cannot take photographs.’
The senior official corrected him: ‘That’s original – no restoration.’

Ahmed was too afraid to say that the palace had been damaged and the
cupola destroyed in 1982. At least 20,000 people were killed in Hama
when a rebellion against the Assads’ Alawite regime by the Muslim
Brotherhood was brutally suppressed.

Syrians avoid disrespect towards the Assad family. We turned this to
our advantage in Aleppo when we were dragged protesting into a carpet
shop. Spotting a rug depicting Bashar Assad, I asked innocently how
much it was. The voluble salesman was momentarily lost for words.
‘You can’t have one,’ he spluttered, imagining with horror that this
Westerner might take away the image of his president and use it as
a doormat.

Only one Syrian brought up politics with us. ‘God bless Her Majesty,’
said a portly man in the Aleppo souk. ‘The royal family are doing a
great job – much better than our government. I criticise it openly
because I trust you. We have lots of political prisoners. Write some
letters through Amnesty International, please.’

Tourists need not dwell on this; indeed, discussion of current
affairs is best avoided. And the Assad regime’s isolation from the
West has helped preserve an innocence in Syrians that is genuinely
affecting. After nearly 20 years of travelling, Hotel Zenobia, in
Palmyra, was the first place where I had been phoned in my room to
be reminded that breakfast was about to finish.

Once an oasis city between the Mediterranean and the Euphrates,
Palmyra is 10 square kilometres of astonishing ruins dating back to
the 2nd century AD, and a fabled destination for European travellers
that you can enjoy almost alone. Only the occasional boy trying to
sell rides on his camel will disturb you as you watch the sun set
behind the colonnades and temples.

Apamea, another ruined city, was deserted on the day we visited.
Founded by one of Alexander the Great’s generals, it was constructed of
granite and visited by Mark Antony and Cleopatra. Some of its columns
still stand, but the rest lie in piles of ancient rubble. The Krak
des Chevaliers, built by the Crusaders and once known as the ‘key of
Christendom’, was described by Lawrence as ‘the finest castle in the
world’, and it is breathtaking.

But the lasting memories will be of Syria’s people: the board-games
seller who told us not to buy his chess set because the knights had
faces like dogs; or the Kurdish children herding goats around the
ruined basilica of St Simeon who stopped to stare and smile.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress