Aleppo: the magnificent, magical city destroyed by war
For centuries, Aleppo was famed as a beacon of tolerance, where Jews, Muslims and Christians lived together amid some of the most beautiful buildings on Earth. Peter Frankopan mourns the destruction of an idyll
For millennia, Aleppo was one of the pearls of Asia. It no longer is. The city that used to look magical at dusk and dawn, its majestic citadel dominating the skyline for miles around, its streets filled with throngs of people going about their daily business, is no more. Every day brings worse and worse news. Every day the memories of how life used to be seem more and more distant, till they become unbelievable. Every day the city draws one breath fewer. Watching Aleppo since the war started in Syria has been like watching a friend being ravaged by aggressive, untreatable cancer.
The human cost of the suffering in Aleppo is barely possible to describe, and the fear, hatred and aggression of those fighting is all but impossible to understand – either in the city or elsewhere. And yet Aleppo is not just a Syrian tragedy: it serves as a symbol of a world in discord, fracture and intolerance that we can all recognise closer to home. Aleppo was once a beacon, an oasis where people of different faiths and beliefs, ethnicity and nationality, got on with one another, choosing cooperation over animosity, mutual interest rather than mutual destruction. The city that once epitomised harmony has gone.
The dream lasted for the best part of 5,000 years. Excavations in the citadel in Aleppo in the 1990s revealed a giant temple, one of the most important places of worship in the Middle East – the region that was the cradle of civilisation, where the first cities were built, where the first laws were passed and where humans first learnt to distribute tasks among themselves to optimise life for all. Clay tablets found at Ebla, about 30 miles away, show that the temple was a pilgrim destination dedicated to the Mesopotamian storm god Addu, whose destructive and life-giving powers were thought worthy of respect.
Others were drawn to the hill that sits at the centre of modern Aleppo – or what is left of it. Legend had it that Abraham used to climb up to enjoy the view and to milk his sheep, one possible reason for the city’s name: from halab, the Arabic for milk. Jews venerated this place as sacred: it was passed down the generations that one of King David’s generals personally laid the foundations for the synagogue that was built on the site three millennia ago. In time, Christians and Muslims built churches and mosques that were spectacular displays of engineering as well as being astonishingly beautiful – such as the old Cathedral
of St Helena and, above all, the jawdropping Great Mosque, built by Umayyad caliphs several decades after the Arab conquests in the seventh century.
We forget that in the past, competition between faiths was not always carried out by knights going on crusades to fight in holy wars, or Muslim marauders murdering infidels. Rivalries could and often did take the form of building prestige, or of conspicuous good treatment of others. One German visitor to Aleppo in the 16th century was astonished to find pilgrims who had just taken part in the hajj to Mecca offering water to anyone who needed to quench their thirst, including Christians, to demonstrate “love and charity to those that are thirsty”.
Such kindness was a characteristic for which the citizens of Aleppo were famous. “A man from Aleppo is a gentleman,” was one well-known saying in Ottoman times, as Philip Mansel reminds us in his new book on the history of the city. There were good reasons for this reputation. Although it is not a port (the Mediterranean coast is more than 70 miles away), the city had a maritime feel to it, because it was on the edge not of the sea but of the desert. In fact, wrote the medieval chronicler William of Tyre almost a thousand years ago, the “waves of sand, like those of the sea, want to rise and fall as in a tempest, a fact that renders the crossing of these perilous reaches not less dangerous than sailing over the sea”. Those who made it to Aleppo from the east really had to want to get there.
Their determination was fuelled in part by the rich location to the west of the city, described by the 11th century Arab physician Ibn Butlan as a place “where villages ran continuous, their gardens full of flowers and the water flowing on every hand”. But it was also driven by the fact that Aleppo was part of the web of connections that ultimately linked the Pacific coast of China with the Indian Ocean, Persian Gulf and Mediterranean Sea.
As we are having to remind ourselves in the UK today, trade and prosperity go hand in hand. They bring many byproducts – including cosmopolitanism, tolerance and exchange of ideas. Commercial transactions are only part of the picture when it comes to looking at the benefits of close cooperation with neighbours and those from far away. Aleppo was a trade centre par excellence, attracting traders and scholars from far and wide
“Legend has it that Abraham used to climb the hill that sits at the centre of modern Aleppo, to enjoy the view and to milk his sheep”
to come and live in the city. It was an excellent place to buy cotton and textiles that were made in the city, but also to buy spices from India, as well as precious stones such as rubies, sapphires and diamonds. The city’s role as an emporium drew merchants from “all parts of the world”, wrote one French traveller in the 17th century, who noted the presence of Turks, Arabs, Persians and Indians, as well as Dutch, French, Italian and English traders.
In the case of the last, Aleppo was a place of particular interest for the Levant Company, set up in the Elizabethan age to try to build business ties with Asia. This was hardly surprising given reports of caravans numbering a thousand men and 5,000 camels at a time bringing goods from India and the Gulf through Kuwait as far as the city.
It is a mark of Aleppo’s cosmopolitanism that in 1676, about 40 men in the employ of the Levant Company decided to take time out from their business pursuits to organise some leisure pursuits just outside the city. They set up and played a game of cricket. It was the first time the game had been played outside England. What the locals made of it is not known. But it is unlikely they would have been surprised by new ideas and new customs, for the inhabitants of Aleppo were nothing if not open-minded and had a long-standing reputation for being able to get along, regardless of race, language or religion.
Those living in the city were careful to respect disparate views and to work together. In the late 18th century, for example, the leading families in the city all had strong connections with the Christian elite so each could take advantage of the other’s strengths and mitigate their own weaknesses. Aleppo had always had a diverse population, with a small Muslim majority living alongside adherents of multiple Christian beliefs, as well as a sizeable Jewish community. This, too, was not unusual in the cities of the Silk Roads, where flexibility and adaptability were essential ingredients for success. And successful they were, too – not just in places such as Samarkand, Isfahan and Baghdad, once bywords for good taste and jaw-dropping wealth, but also in Aleppo.
The city was home to “many magnificent buildings, which they say cost a great deal of money”, wrote one visitor in the 15th century. The monuments and architecture of Aleppo, agreed another writer 300 years later, were second to none in the Ottoman Empire – equal to or even better than the glories of Constantinople itself. Chief among these were the khans, the inns, warehouses and shops of the al-madina souk, which became the largest covered market in the world, running through about eight miles of narrow streets and alleyways – until large sections were destroyed by artillery shelling and fire over the past four years. It was unique and is irreplaceable.
The nearby Great Mosque, purportedly the site of the tomb of Zechariah, the father of John the Baptist, with its spectacular courtyard and classical façades, has also been badly damaged by fighting, while the Seljuk minaret, built at the end of the 11th century, one of the city’s most famous landmarks, has been destroyed. The citadel that was substantially built up by the son of the great general Saladin, with a rising bridge over the moat, massive walls and a monumental entrance, has been badly affected by bomb attacks and mortar fire on Syrian army troops who have taken up position there. Then there is the glorious Cathedral of the Forty Martyrs, built by donations from the Armenian community more than 500 years ago, and targeted by bombing last year, intentionally or otherwise.
The loss of and heavy damage to these monuments is nothing compared with the human suffering and the unimaginable loss felt by almost every single family still in the city. But it is not just buildings and lives that have been destroyed. So has the soul of Aleppo. There is no way back from here. It is possible to rebuild the glorious merchants’ houses, whose discreet entrances on the narrow streets belie the marvellous courtyards, reception rooms and private baths where the rich could indulge their tastes and display their wealth in private. But it is not possible to recover the way people used to live, or restore the way they used to treat each other.
More than 100 years ago the city was home to splendours such as the literary salon of Maryana Marrash, a remarkable woman who collected intellectuals and gossips around her to discuss the Mu’allaqat, a cycle of pre-islamic Arabic poetry – as well as the work of the French writer François Rabelais. There was something magical about Aleppo. Lawrence of Arabia certainly felt it. It was astonishing, he wrote, that in this extraordinary city “fellowship should rule between Christian and Mohammedan, Armenian, Arab, Turk, Kurd and Jew [more] than in perhaps any other great city of the Ottoman Empire”. Nowhere, he said, had he found a population more friendly towards Europeans than the Aleppines.
That has all changed. The city has had its ups and downs in history – as all cities have. There have been periods of tension between the different parts of the population, often over taxation, sometimes over oppressive governors and sometimes spilling into violence, such as in 1850 during a two-day assault on Christians in the north of the city. But these have been rare and Aleppo has, until now, been a beacon of stability.
The city has been on its knees before, and has had to recover slowly – for example, after a devastating earthquake in 1170 and following the Black Death, which was as deadly in the Middle East as it was in Europe. It has seen horror, too, at the hands of the Mongols in 1260, and the conqueror Timur – or Tamerlane – in 1400. These outsiders brought brutal violence against the city’s inhabitants. But what has happened in the past four years is on a different scale of suffering, a different scale of destruction and a different scale of suffocation. Aleppo is no more. Recovery from natural disaster, illness and attacks by outsiders is one thing; slaughter on the scale of the past four years by former friends, neighbours and colleagues is another.
With each day that passes, it has become clearer that we have not just been watching the terrible death of a city, but a shadow fall on humanity. For thousands of years, Aleppo was a symbol of all that is good about mankind. Today, we can reflect that it shows us all that is bad.
This article first appeared in The Times. Peter Frankopan is the author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, published by Bloomsbury at £10.99. To buy from The Week Bookshop, visit www.theweek.co.uk/bookshop.
“It may be possible to rebuild the glorious merchants’ houses. It is not possible to restore the way people used to treat each other”