All worlds remember Damascus, reports Scott Kraft, of the Los Angeles Times, but there are still new memories waiting to be created.
Early travellers crossing the desert to Syria got their first view of Damascus from the top of Jebel Qassioun, a gently sloped mountain northwest of town. It was not a sight they soon forgot.
Upon seeing Damascus from the mount, the Prophet Muhammad refused to descend into the city, declaring one could enter paradise only once and he would save himself for the one above.
Though my arrival in Syria was by Airbus rather than by desert caravan, I knew my first stop had to be Qassioun mountain. My driver, Mohammed Madal, grew wistful.
‘‘Every time we return to our country,'' he said, ‘‘we have to come to Qassioun to feel like a Syrian again.''
A warm, dry breeze brushed our faces and the lights of Damascus winked to life, its minarets coming into view. In the distance were the oval-shaped ramparts of old Damascus, the Old City.
Next morning, I set out on foot for the Souk al-Hamadiye, the largest and best known of the Old City ‘‘souks'', or Arab markets.
The wide cobblestone street, which dates from Roman times, was lined with two-storey shops.
An arched dome of corrugated iron rose high above the avenue, and pinpoints of sunlight beamed through bullet holes dating to the 1920s, when French warplanes put down an uprising of Arab nationalists.
The crowds were thinned by Ramadan, the annual month of daylight fasting for Muslims, but shops were open.
I strolled through the souk and emerged into a sunny courtyard dominated by the 9m-tall remnant of a Roman archway.
Rising from the far end of the courtyard was the western wall of the great Umayyad Mosque, one of the holiest sites in Islam.
The site of the mosque has been a place of worship since the ninth century BC, when Aramaeans built a temple to their god. It was later a temple to the Roman god Jupiter, and when Emperor Constantine became a Christian, it was replaced by a basilica dedicated to John the Baptist.
The Christians were nudged out in the eighth century AD, when Damascus became the capital of the early Islamic world, and the existing structure was built.
The mosque complex, including a courtyard and prayer hall, is 180m long by 90m wide and enclosed by enormous walls that still hold the Roman temple's original stonework.
The three corner minarets and the Dome of the Eagle, which stands on four pillars inside the south wall, are visible for miles.
I lined up with the faithful, doffed my shoes and entered the red-carpeted mosque, which echoed with the muezzin's call to prayer.
Velvet ropes divided the cavernous hall into three distinct sections. Along the south wall, facing Mecca, hundreds of men prayed. On the north side, robed women chatted and tended to children.
In the middle, visitors took photographs, gazed at mosaics on the walls, read the Koran and napped on the carpet. Near the centre of the hall was a prominent reminder of pre-Islamic history - an ornate green-glass monument said to be the tomb of John the Baptist.
From the mosque, I set off to explore the Old City, an antique gemstone surrounded by a traffic-clogged metropolis of 4 million people.
Modern Damascus spreads across a valley of drab apartment buildings sprouting satellite dishes.
But the Old City, a Unesco World Heritage Site, is an oasis of charming timelessness.
A warren of alleyways offered cumin, apple-flavoured tobacco and, occasionally, rotting garbage.
Kiosks were selling spices and nuts, yellow figs, and perfumes from plastic bottles.
The Old City claims to have been continuously inhabited for nearly 5000 years, and it features remnants of Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Ottoman empires standing side by side and, sometimes, on top of one another.
As American author Mark Twain wrote in The Innocents Abroad, ‘‘Damascus . . . has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.''
The United States State Department discourages travel to Syria because of its support for Hizbollah guerrillas and its ties with Iran. Partly for that reason, it is not overrun by tourists.
Yet the Syrians were friendly and welcoming. Strangers paid little attention, and I was carried along by the music of Arabic conversations and the sensation of being anonymous.
Many cafes in the Muslim quarter of the Old City were closed for lunch during Ramadan, but the smaller Christian quarter was bustling with activity.
At an open, unmarked window, three men inside were sweeping puffy brown pita bread off a small conveyor belt into plastic bags. One of the workers handed over a bag with six pieces of delicious bread, still warm, for the equivalent of a few cents.
Damascus is a good place to shop for Persian and Afghan rugs. For centuries, Muslims from all over the Middle East and Asia brought rugs with them on their pilgrimages to Damascus, trading them for food and lodging or leaving them behind as gifts.
There were dozens of rug merchants, including Issam Lahham. I found the grey-haired proprietor standing outside his shop, off Hamadiye souk. In his downstairs showroom, he laid out carpet after handmade carpet, patiently giving a lesson in the history of each.
The rug business in Damascus, Lahham said, was not good. ‘‘We have very few buyers. Very few,'' he said.
Issam's carpet prices, compared with those in Turkey and Pakistan, seemed fair. I selected two small handmade tribal rugs, each about 80 years old, for under $US400 ($NZ500).
For dinner, I had booked a table at Beit Jabri, or Jabri House, near Umayyad Mosque. The restaurant's front door opened on to a beautiful 18th-century Ottoman mansion and a courtyard dining room.
During Ramadan, restaurants in the Muslim quarter have just one seating time for dinner and it begins promptly at sunset when the daylong fast is broken.
When I arrived, Beit Jabri was already packed with boisterous diners, many of them large families, seated at tables laden with ‘‘mezze'', Middle Eastern appetisers including hummus, lettuce-and-tomato salad, red-pepper puree, garlicky eggplant ‘‘baba ghanouj'', a bowl of large black-eyed peas in garlic and tomato, and another of green beans, pine nuts and tomato.
Busy waiters filled glasses with fruit juice (no alcohol is served).
No-one was eating, though - it was a few minutes after 6pm and not yet sunset. As we waited, the sky above the courtyard turned from blue to grey.
At 6.22pm, the Umayyad Mosque muezzin's sonorous call to prayer filled the air and the courtyard fountain splashed to life. The diners dug in energetically.
The atmosphere was festive and relaxed. A table of young women played a card game while puffing on a hookah with fruit-flavoured tobacco.
Back in Hamadiye souk, shops that had closed for dinner were reopening.
The streets were filled with couples, friends and families strolling, laughing and talking.
I soaked it all in, feeling fortunate to be part of Damascus, if only for a day. - Los Angeles Times-Washington Post











