The Road from Damascus by Bruce Palling

There can’t be many bazaars in the world where the main obstacles are hand-pulled carts laden with almonds or impatient peasants overtaking each other on donkeys. Then again, you have to be prepared for anything in the huge souk of Damascus. It may have the Arabic equivalent of Harrods Food Hall with amazing ice creams, sweets and pastries, but you are also confronted by medicinal shops with dried crocodiles, shrivelled tortoise shells and cured deerskins. There are several acres of stalls in this sprawling covered market selling every imaginable variant of food, clothing, carpets, herbs, spices, jewellery – and then there are the camel whips and Bedouin daggers.

And when you tire of this amazing spectacle, you walk through the columns and archways of the remains of a gigantic Roman temple to Jupiter, now occupied by the Eighth Century Great Ummayad Mosque, which incorporates an earlier church.

And I haven’t even mentioned that after viewing Saladin’s tomb and another shrine for John the Baptist, you can walk a short distance to an Eighteenth Century Ottoman town house and eat superb food in a private courtyard for less than £10. Most people probably imagine that Syria is not for the faint-hearted, what with once being on President Bush’s “Axis of Evil” shortlist. For a tourist though, nothing could be further from reality – Syria is one of the safest and most welcoming countries I have ever been as a Western tourist.

 In the remotest locations next to ancient churches and villages, children would regularly pick spring flower and shyly offer bouquets to my wife. (Those tales about Arab hospitality to strangers are also all true.) Combine that with the ease of travel throughout the countryside and deserts plus hundreds, yes, hundreds of staggeringly preserved ancient towns, cities, churches, mosques, monuments and Crusader castles and you begin to understand why international travellers antennae has suddenly tuned into Syria.

In Damascus, we stayed in the Talisman, a perfectly restored townhouse in the Jewish quarter of the Old City. We spent our first full day wandering through the alleyways and drinking coffee in the charmingly ornate Al Nawfara Coffee Shop, which still has a raised platform and comfortable arm chair from where an Arabic storyteller sits each evening. There are all the treasures of the National Museum and palaces to visit but we were impatient to get on the road and head north to the Krak de Chevalier, the great Crusader Castle that was never conquered in battle.

Perched on its own levelled hill, this looming fortress looks like a stone battle ship hidden behind impregnable ramparts and towers. Lawrence of Arabia thought it “perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world”. Although it eventually fell to Arab forces through trickery, the new masters never defaced or wrecked it, so that the internal rooms and churches are still remarkably intact.

Just north of here, we stumbled onto Apamea, Syria’s largest classical site, with a colonnaded street more than a mile and quarter long. The remains of a four-mile long wall surround the entire city, but what makes it so memorable is that we had it entirely to ourselves, apart from some shepherds with their scattered flocks of sheep. The wheel ruts from chariots are still etched on the cobbles, which once transported Antony and Cleopatra when they visited here on their honeymoon in 37BC. Of course there are some villagers offering you fake Roman coins or statuettes but they soon retire when they see your lack of interest. Our guide mentions another interesting development – a local sect that worships the female body and every year celebrates by having an “exchange of the blood” ceremony, which seemed to consist of some fairly riotous behaviour involving the female believers.

Shortly after leaving Apamea, you drive past a handful of ruined castles and then enter into the “Lost Cities” zone of Syria. This consists of literally hundreds of abandoned towns and cities from the fourth to sixth centuries AD. These were some of the most prosperous places in the Ancient World as northern Syria was the largest producer of olive oil, which was used for lighting as well as for cooking throughout the Roman world. There was also a thriving wine trade, with the remains of wine presses next to the villas. During the upheavals at the end of the Roman era and around the time of the arrival of Islam, whole regions were simply abandoned so they were never conquered or destroyed except by the occasional earthquake.

One of the largest – and perhaps the most hauntingly beautiful ones, is Bara, which was close to paradise on earth. The entire area has been replanted with olive groves surrounding the substantial ruins, interspersed with large trees and well-maintained dry stone walls. In springtime, the greenery is carpeted with glorious splashes of colour from the poppies, irises and daisies, not to mention scented Jasmine.

A short distance away is Serjilla, which looks a small Cotswolds village with the roofs missing. On our visit, past the huge tabletop tombs and remains of churches and olive presses, there were small groups of Syrian families having picnics. One group beckoned over our guide who then said they wished to discover a secret from my wife. “They are extremely envious and want to know how you manage to keep your legs so smooth and white”, he said. 

The next port of call is Aleppo – some historians believe it is the last example of a traditional Ottoman city, with its large population of Muslims, a dozen different Christian sects and even 30 or so remaining Jews. We ate at Zmorod, the best restaurant in town where a plasma screen showed Stuttgart vs. Barcelona while next to us a Catholic Bishop wearing a crucifix and a Gold Rolex sat smoking a water pipe while sharing a half empty bottle of Johnny Walker Black label with some other priests. It is the cultural contradictions that make foreign travel so stimulating. Where else would you see three Burkha wearing women all in black sit on a park bench while one of them breast feeds her baby?

 There is enough in Aleppo to keep you busy for a day or two, what with the enormous citadel where Abraham is alleged to have visited and a Souk even more exotic than Damascus, with mountain truffles being the delicacy of the moment.

The other extraordinary discovery in the citadel was the tomb of St George in one of the walls. I have no idea how much of him rests in the tomb but it doesn;t stop local Muslims treating him like a saint. The rather rundown Barons Hotel, which was the temporary home of Lawrence of Arabia and Agatha Christie, also merits a nostalgic drink in the bar.

For us though the highlight of the entire journey was a five mile walk through the near-deserted countryside to St Simeon’s Monastery, an hour or so to the west of Aleppo. Apart from the beauty of the perfectly preserved churches, hermit towers and ruins, it offers a lesson in the power of celebrity.

The first place we visited was a barren cliff face with a Roman eagle and the figure of a Roman officer called Titus Flavius Julianus, reclining on a banquet couch above a crudely cut rock tomb. He had probably deserted from the legion in the late Second Century and lived a quiet life with his local wife, who was buried next to him. Every other detail of their lives is lost to history.

By contrast, two centuries later, a young monk called Simeon made a name for himself just a few miles away by wearing a spiked girdle that drew blood when he moved and later by burying himself up to his chin each summer. After quarrelling with his fellow monks, he eventually spent the last 36 years of his life living more than 60 feet off the ground on an exposed pillar, where he ranted at the thousands of pilgrims who came from as far away as Britain and Persia.

After his death in 459, Zeno, the Roman Emperor, decided to build a monastery around his pillar. Most of the walls and arches still stand today –a colossal structure, which could easily hold 10,000 worshippers. It is extraordinary to think that this masochistic exhibitionist inspired the construction of one of the greatest Churches in Christendom. All that remains of St Simeon’s pillar is an egg like stump as over the centuries, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of worshippers have chipped away stony mementoes. Tennyson wrote a rather ironic poem about St Simeon, including this extract which suggests perhaps it was all an illusion on the part of the quarrelsome fanatic:

Let this avail, just, dreadful, mighty God,

This not be all in vain, that thrice ten years,

Thrice multiplied by superhuman pangs,

In hungers and in thirsts, fevers and cold,

In coughs, aches, stitches, ulcerous throes and cramps,

A sign betwixt the meadow and the cloud,

Patient on this tall pillar I have borne

Rain, wind, frost, heat, hail, damp, and sleet, and snow;

We then moved into the desert, which at one point was less than 100 miles from Bagdad. After visiting the walled city of Resafe, prudence made us decline to eat in the local flyblown tourist café. Instead, our guide managed to find some bananas and tins of sardines as well as some freshly baked bread, which we thought would tide us over until we made it to Palmyra. The problems began when we realised we didn’t have a knife, so we stopped at a tiny one roomed store on the edge of the desert to see if we could buy or borrow one.

The shopkeeper would not hear of it and quickly invited us back to his modest two roomed house covered in old carpets. The only gesture towards modernity was an enormous satellite dish but I never saw a television.

Soon he was joined by his relatives and aged father, who was a resettled Bedouin from the desert. Nothing was too much trouble and tea was brought in along with some tomatoes, scrambled eggs and ham. Then, after learning he was the local schoolteacher, we left after taking numerous pictures of his extended family and curious children. He then embraced me in the traditional manner along with kisses on both cheeks.

We spent the remainder of our journey visiting equally impressive ruins at Qasr Al-Hayr; a monastery with an Italian priest and of course, Palmyra, the greatest collection of Roman ruins in the Middle East. But even on extraordinary trips like this, it is these human encounters that make the most lasting impression.

Corinthian Travel are the best agents (www.corinthiantravel.co.uk)

Monuments of Syria by Ross Burns (Third Edition, Taurus, 2009)

More a gazeteer than a guide, but brilliant
Bradt Guide to Syria by Diana Darke (Second Edition 2010)
too PC for me but is the best for general use

A shorter version of this story appeared in the Daily Mail on Saturday November 6 2010