To the Oldest City on Earth

The last morning in Aleppo was spent finding a way to Damascus. I first walked to the train station, only to find that there were no trains until the next day. As nice as Aleppo was, I was on a schedule now, and took a taxi to the bus station. Tourists, it seems, tend to head straight to Damascus–as soon as I stepped inside the station touts from one of the country started shouting: “Eh! English! Damascus?” I nodded, and got a ticket all the way for only two hundred SYP, or about four dollars.

It was about a four hour ride across dry, dry country, with some kind of Syrian soap opera playing on the bus television–and judging by the overlaid website address and poor video quality, a pirated one at that. When we finally got into the Damascus bus station we were met by a swarm of taxis and drivers, one of whom spoke English and told me he knew of cheap hotels to stay in. It wasn’t until we were driving that I noticed how fast the meter was rising–and that the “cheap” hotels he was talking about were “very nice, very cheap, only sixty dollars for night!” When we stopped in front of a ritzy establishment with fake waterfalls and a faux Mongol theme, I figured out what was happening. Those hotels were full anyway, and the taxi driver wanted to take me somewhere else (my bags were locked in the trunk), but the meter was already at 450 SYP, over double what the entire ride from Aleppo had cost, and I convinced him to get my bags out for me, and, grudgingly, paid.

At this point, of course, I had no idea where I was. By now it was also getting dark, so I walked around for a bit, trying to find some cheap hotels I’d heard of, and finally settled on the cheapest one I could find at the hour–a three bed room for thirty dollars. Not bad by American standards, but it still hurt in the wallet.

The next day, I picked up a map from the local tourist information office and finally located the backpacker district of Damascus. This worked rather better–after checking a few places I found one where I could sleep on the roof for only 300 SYP a night, and, if I wanted, get a full breakfast for another 100 on top of that. Six dollars for lodging, I thought, was well worth the price, so I moved my luggage.

Now, finally, it was time to do what I had come to do: explore Damascus. I made my way into the old town, which has been an active city for at least five thousand years–the oldest on the planet–and headed for the main attraction, the Ummayad mosque. To get there, I took the main souq, a long thoroughfare called Souq Hamidieh. The Grand Bazaar in Istanbul had struck me as an Arabic shopping mall and the Aleppo souqs had seemed interesting and labyrinthine; this, the main souq of Damascus, was something else again. A wide road lined with shops and a high, arching metal ceiling, the souq is packed with people and curves into the distance. The constant foot traffic stirs up a lot of dust, and the holes in the ceiling–supposedly bullet holes from some of the battles for independence from the French in the early twentieth century–let in pencil-thin rays of sunlight that dapple the ground. Though more touristed than the Aleppo souqs, Al Hamidieh still manages to put off a combined feeling of medieval Arabic commerce and French colonial sophistication.

The end of the souq opens up through an archway of ancient Roman columns, now hung with rugs and swarming with street vendors, onto the square of the Ummayad mosque. Like the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, the Ummayad Mosque also reflects the history of its city. It began its life as the Roman temple to Zeus. The columns at the end of the souq were once the main entrance to the temple, and one can still see the old Roman structure now built into the walls of the mosque. One of the gates still has Latin inscriptions from the time. With the Byzantines, the temple was converted into a church. And, with the rise of the Ummayad Dynasty in Damascus (the first Islamic empire) the church was converted into a mosque, which is what it is to this day.

I walked around the mosque, quite an impressive structure with its wide marble courtyard. Inside, behind an ornate bronze latticework wall and inside a marble box, is supposedly the head of John the Baptist, also considered to be a prophet in Islam. After making the rounds and stopping in next door to pay my respects at the grave of Saladin, I headed back onto the streets to just explore. Damascus is full of old and winding streets, many built over with wooden crossbeams to provide both more building space above and more shade below. The streets are really too narrow for vehicle traffic, but that doesn’t seem to stop anybody; you’ll be walking along a street when a taxi or truck rumbles down behind you, honking, and everyone presses to the wall to let it pass.

On the way back some carpenters in a shop waved to me to take a picture of their shop, and then invited me, with almost no English, to stop for some tea. We started talking as best we could–I spoke no Arabic, and one of them spoke only a little English, and both of us spoke a little Russian. I told him in Russian I wanted to come back to Damascus to study Russian, and he and his friends immediately started pointing to objects and telling me how to say them. I pulled out my notebook and started writing, filling a few pages of my notebook. Their favorite was “hmar kbir”: big donkey.

As the sun began to go down I made it back to the Ummayad square, where I was approached by a Syrian man who spoke excellent English, and wanted to ask me some questions. I said all right. He then proceeded to ask me a series of completely random questions about English phrases and syntax–we started talking, and he ended up showing me around, including a good place to eat at an old house that had been converted into a restaurant, now known as Beit Jabri, or House Jabri.

His name was Moumen, and we ended up meeting the next day as well, after I’d walked around the souks for some time. One of my favorite parts of Syria is the juice sellers–freshly squeezed strawberry juice, blackberry juice, tamarind juice, a glass with ice for only twenty-five SYP or so. Moumen showed me around a bit, pointing out the old gates of the city and interesting landmarks, and told me about living in Syria. Perhaps the most interesting thing to me, as a westerner, was hearing about the “vice police”: how adultery, or premarital sex, is still a punishable crime in Syria, and the lengths to which young non-Muslim Syrians go to to escape the watchful eyes of neighbors and hotel owners.

My last full day in Damascus I met some of Moumen’s friends, three Dutch girls who were visiting Syria for a couple of weeks, and were leaving the same day I was (today). All three of them had studied psychology, though only one was going through with her studies, and all three lived and worked in Amsterdam. The four of us and two of Moumen’s friends, Tarik and Mahmoud, went out for dinner and talked until late in the evening.

I’m still in Damascus now, the southernmost point of my trip. In a few hours I’ll head north to the old Roman city of Palmyra, now abandoned out in the desert, and from there continue on back up into eastern Turkey and, hopefully, Georgia before I have to head back to Istanbul.