My long-lost love affair with Syria
Mark Stratton mourns a country scarred by a decade of civil war that he once relished visiting
Prior to president Assad’s security forces crushing anti-regime protests in Deraa on March 15 2011, unleashing a decade of Armageddon, I would find any excuse to visit Syria, a country I fell in love with. From Amman, once, I rode to Damascus by the fabled Hejaz railway – already by then a decrepit vanity project to Mecca of Ottoman design. Mischievous children hurled stones at the carriages in the Damascene suburbs, despite little being left of the livery worth spoiling. Another time, I shared a black Mercedes taxi from Beirut; staring at the red-and-white keffiyeh of an old Palestinian in front, I was destined not to reach my guesthouse until nightfall because a cultured fellow passenger, an Amharic-speaking Christian doctor, insisted I meet his charming family. Coffee became meze then arak, and I wonder now if he survived the war.
My decoupage of memories extends to sucking upon my first narghile water pipe in Damascus’s palimpsest old city at a café alongside the Umayyad mosque. The melon-infused shisha, sickly sweet. And basking like a lizard on the sun-scorched bastions of the 12th-century crusader castle, Crac des Chevaliers, imagining the besieging armies of Islam below. And I hiked once through the Syrian Desert to Palmyra – footsore and wishing I’d emulated the 19th-century adventuress Lady Hester Stanhope, the new Zenobia, and ridden, instead, by horseback to reach the world-famous Greco-Roman ruins.
I adored Aleppo, too, although my memories of this once cosmopolitan city and later rebel stronghold, annihilated by the war, now feel like rosetinted fiction. I recall Aleppo’s labyrinthine souk, where a friend haggled for a carpet while sunrays perforated the semi-darkness beneath the covered souk’s holed iron roof and intensified the sheen of hanging silks and damask. Later, we drank G&Ts at the Baron Hotel, where Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express in room 203, and where the faucets groan like the overburdened donkeys on the Aleppine streets.
Nowadays, however, this Syria feels like a stranger, all memories subsumed by a conflict of savage barbarity that has claimed half a million lives and displaced over 12million people.
Perhaps I was just plain naive as to any other outcome when visiting as Syria’s popularity surged throughout the 2000s and it truly became a tourist destination. The writing for troubles ahead was quite literally on the wall, in every shop and on every street, portraits and posters propagating the Orwellian omnipotence of the cultish Ba’athist rule of the Assads – the flinty stare of Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000, and then, latterly, his son and successor, Bashar, who has a British wife.
My last visit was in 2010 before the Arab Spring uprisings when winds of change swept across the Middle East yet ultimately foundered upon citadels of authoritarianism, not least Damascus. Besides horror at the ensuing violence, it wasn’t only the war’s assault on 8,000 years of cultural heritage that has worried me since (who can forget Islamic State’s destruction of “idolatrous” temples at Palmyra?) but also the displacement afforded to an ethnic heterogeneity I’d never seen the likes of in the Middle East. As well as the Alawite Shia, and the majority Sunni, I recall meeting Lebanese Druzes, Kurds, Syriac Christians, Armenians whose ancestors fled Turkey, and Yazidis, who are believed by IS fundamentalists to worship the devil.
Mr Bashir, a pioneer of Syrian tourism, has lived through this all in Damascus. He tells me much of Syria can once again be visited. “Every place under government control, Damascus, Palmyra, Aleppo, Hama, all these are safe,” he says, although he concedes there are parts under the control of “somebody else” – his euphemism for the “opposition”. He includes Deir ez-Zur, in eastern Syria, until recently part of the IS caliphate, where many moons ago I stood on a handsome yet subsequently destroyed 1920s bridge over the Euphrates and listened to the muezzins’ calls suspended in the sticky heat.
Mr Bashir says his own house was hit several times by mortars. “The fighting came close to my house, but we didn’t move,” he says. He took in relatives from the Damascene suburbs of Ghouta who had lost their homes to the war.
Remarkably, as the fighting still raged, by 2019 he was hosting tour groups again. Mostly French and Italian. “There was little damage to the heritage of Damascus. All the souks are functioning, colourful and beautiful as ever. Our people are very poor, the sanctions are hurting, but they are happy to see visitors back,” he says.
He helps me piece together what remains of Syrian heritage outside Damascus. I retain Technicolor memories of ornately carved Greco-Roman temples dedicated to Mesopotamian gods and the thoroughfare of Corinthian columns at the wondrous Palmyra, every bit Syria’s Petra or Luxor. Already long-established since Tiberius conquered this city in 14AD, control of Palmyra vacillated between the Persians, Romans and Byzantine empires, who embellished it over time, unlike Islamic State, who during a brief occupancy in 2015 blew-up Palmyra’s iconic Lion of al-Lat statue and the Temple of Bel, tore down the tetrapylon, and demolished the funerary towers. “You can visit but need a permit, which is easy to get,” says Mr Bashir.
Elsewhere the ancient wooden irrigation waterwheels of Hama, a city crushed by Assad’s forces, continue to turn, despite being in need of urgent restoration. The colossal Crac de Chevaliers castle of the Hospitaller Order of Saint-John of Jerusalem has reopened. It suffered wartime strafing after reverting to type when 17 foreign fighters held it briefly before falling to the Syrian military. And, in Aleppo, some 40 per cent of the famous souk that was razed to the ground has reportedly been restored and reopened, yet the damaged Baron Hotel has scarcely served a cocktail since 2014.
“We won’t be gung-ho and go back until Syria is completely safe. I think we may look at trips running there in 2023,” says Jonny Bealby, founder of Wild Frontiers (wildfrontierstravel.com). A decade ago, Syria was their second most popular destination. “It came from nowhere overnight,” he says. “You could fly into Damascus on a Thursday and out of Aleppo on a Monday. It became a mid-haul city break; it was really big for us.
“We absolutely loved Syria; its history just blows your mind. I went to a site at Ebla dating to the third millennium BC, where they discovered 17,000 cuneiform tablets. Some were deciphered as detailing a medical conference. Can you imagine that? A medical conference 5,000 years ago.”
One tour operator that is offering Syria now is Rocky Road Travel (rockyroadtravel.com), based in Berlin. They returned in 2018 and feature a sevenday tour this October that includes Damascus, Palmyra and Aleppo. “We’re keen to present the human side to the country and crisis. Syrians want to show the world their country is a welcoming place with incredible culture and history, not just negative headlines,” says Shane Horan, Rocky Road’s founder.
“The situation is improving. A lot of reconstruction is under way, and let’s hope that – for the good of the Syrian people – security, foreign investment and tourism will return some sense of normality to their lives. A full rebuild however may never be possible as long as Assad remains in power,” concedes Horan.
I yearn to return but for now this feels unconscionable, as it would dishonour a generation of suffering that will continue as Syria sleepwalks full circle back to a regime that has sacrificed their country’s soul for power. But Mr Bashir tells me deep down Syrians have not changed so much. “I was walking recently in eastern Damascus when I heard church bells ringing and at the same time the call to prayer. That’s why we object to saying ‘civil war’ – it wasn’t between cities and religions, it was differences of opinions, regime against rebels. Tolerance is still rooted here,” he says.
There’s currently another small matter, too. Covid-19 has closed some of Syria’s borders and air routes, although daily case rates are currently below 100 new infections per day. Mr Bashir says you can still enter the country via neighbouring Lebanon, and he contextualises the virus’s threat with a smile. “People here do not care much about Covid-19. We joke it has run away from Syria because of the war and gone to other countries.” The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) advises against all travel to Syria.