The road to Damascus

Syria’s ancient cities, exotic markets and overwhelming sense of history are a revelation to two Kiwi travellers. Words: Polly Greeks. Photos: Ryan Rodrick Beiler/dreamstime, Max Galli/laif.

ACCORDING TO AN OLD ADAGE, long before they led to Rome, all roads led to Damascus. However, where those roads go upon arrival in the ancient city is anyone’s guess. Certainly our taxi driver appears flummoxed as an arterial route ruptures into a hopeless tangle of labyrinthine alleyways.

We are lost; gloriously lost. Overhead, old houses lean drunkenly inwards, forming an almost-tunnel over the cobbled lane. Fruit vendors shout as they push past our beaten-up taxi while a donkey stands patiently and boys ring their bicycle bells at the bottleneck. Eventually we’re delivered to a 600-year-old hotel whose inner courtyard is smothered in grapevines. The floors sag alarmingly and the rooms are draughty but, as we are to discover during the next two weeks, Syria’s sense of decay somehow adds to its charm.

From as early as the 15th century BC, when Egyptians recorded the city amongst their conquests, invaders the world over have had their eyes on Damascus as a prime piece of real estate. While the road to Damascus is well off the beaten track in today’s tourist industry, proof that all roads did once lead through this part of the Middle East is evidenced in the locals’ faces. Genghis Khan and his Mongol army, Alexander the Great and his soldiers as well as African peoples, Romans, Persians, Chinese and Turks have all passed this way and left their marks not only on the city’s crumbling architecture but also in the features of their descendents.

Yet despite the varied looks – dark skins, long Roman noses, blue eyes, blonde hair, black curly hair and Asian eyes – people on the streets can spot two Kiwi travellers from a mile away. Surprisingly, instead of being viewed as a pair of cash cows ripe for the milking, our “foreignness” sees us showered in hospitality and goodwill. As we navigate our way through the old city’s maze, seeking palaces, museums, markets and mosques, we’re invited in for so many cups of tea that mandatory toilet breaks are pencilled into our perambulations.

Syria was once a major pit stop on the Silk Road that linked China to Europe and it’s easy to imagine caravans of camels plodding in through the mighty city gates and being unburdened of their exotic wares. Even now, the spice market is a fascinating window into alien worlds with strange dried entrails, chunks of coral, birds’ wings and preserved reptiles hanging over sacks of pungent herbs.

Other souqs or markets host a million tiny stalls that are treasure troves of sumptuous fabrics, Bedouin and Tibetan jewellery, intricate rugs and antique art. Leftovers from colonial days are also amongst the booty overflowing into the lanes – clunky telephones and typewriters, fountain pens and fob watches, pistols and battered gramophones.

As backpackers know, getting souvenirs home can be a problem so I’m forced to make do with using my belly as a sort of suitcase instead, filling it with spicy lentil soups, stuffed breads and miniature preserved fruits, hot beans in tahini and the spicy falafel laced with lemon rind that are sold on street corners.

Judging by the traffic on the roads, Syria is where old Mercedes go to die and the taxi that takes James and me from Damascus to Mar Musa is no exception. Held together in places with string, the vehicle pants its way over a steep and rocky divide before dropping into an immense desert plain through which Bedouin nomads have been driving their flocks for millennia. We are deposited at the foot of a rocky cliff; above us Mar Musa is perched like a medieval castle. Built in the 6th century AD during Byzantine Christianity’s heyday, the monastery had long been abandoned until Father Paolo, a then-young Jesuit priest, rediscovered it in the 1980s and decided to revive the remote site as a place of religious harmony.

What this equates to, we discover when we finally arrive, puffing up the cliff face, is a place where people from all over the world can come to stay for as long as they like, for free. The only proviso is that they participate fully in communal life – tending the goats and desert gardens, cooking and cleaning and taking part in the hour-long silent meditation every evening. No one complains. To sit in the restored ancient church, watching candlelight flicker on the layers of rich medieval frescos as the potent desert silence filters inwards, is a favourite part of the day for us.

In Mark Twain’s words, “the dry bones of a thousand empires” are scattered across Syria’s lands, making it one of the world’s largest archaeological sites. Heading north, we stop to explore the eerie remains of whole towns abandoned since Byzantine times in a region known as the Dead Cities.

Hitchhiking from there to Aleppo, we sense the history as we pass through biblical-feeling villages surrounded by ancient olive groves, where men sieve grains in front of their shops, fruit is unloaded from horse-drawn carts and the elderly sit smoking water pipes and drinking tea.

Aleppo is Syria’s other must-see city, just as famous as Damascus for its markets, mosques and labyrinthine streets. Listed by UNESCO as a World Heritage Site, the magical old metropolis is also famed for its natural olive soaps that are aged like cheddar cheese for up to eight years. We purchase chunks of the stuff and disappear into the his-and-hers hammams or public bath houses for the age-old tradition of a scrub and sauna. Scraped to within an inch of my life by a teeth-gritting woman with a hunk of hessian, I’m sent next to the marble steam room where any solace quickly ends as a group of naked old women arrives to suck on cigarettes in the haze.

In search of yet more dry-boned empires, we set out for our final destination far out in the desert between Syria and Iraq – the vast archaeological site of Palmyra. Set on the edge of a startlingly green oasis, Palmyra’s Roman ruins, which are dated to the second century AD, cover more than half a square kilometre. Abandoned in 634 AD when the city fell to a Muslim army, fallen columns and temple remains today lie like bones beneath big desert skies, silent testimony to the transitory nature of civilizations. Alone, we wander them thoughtfully, marvelling that such exquisitely detailed stone masonry and effort could be left dissolving into the dust.

From Palmyra we’re just 100 kilometres from the Euphrates and we pore over the map, briefly entertaining the adventure of following that legendary river across the border into Kurdistan, Northern Iraq. In the end we decide to play it safe and head back to Lebanon, to fly to Kurdistan instead. But, as Syrian queen Scheherazade said to her husband in Arabia’s most famous piece of literature, One Thousand and One Nights, that’s another story.