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Julian Allason delves into Damascus for The Financial Times: How to Spend it. Click on the image for the full article.
“Do not visit Syria unless you plan to see Palmyra,” my Damascene friend Riad had advised. Yet it is but one of 4,000 archeological sites dating back to 4000BC and earlier in the land with the strongest claim to be “the cradle of civilisation”.
“Syria’s strategic position on the Silk Road, with ports and on a fertile crescent of irrigated land, had drawn the Phoenicians and the empires of Greece, Rome, Persia and Ottoman Turkey. Each has left compelling – sometimes habitable – testimony in stone to their way of life.”
PDF: The Dawn of a new Syria
Syria has, until recently, remained conspicuously absent from the Middle Eastern map of luxury tourism. While Dubai, Oman and Jordan have established themselves as flourishing holiday centres, Syria has languished, a political pariah and, by comparison, little visited by westerners. It is not that the country is unwelcoming: on the contrary, once through the visa bureaucracy the reception could hardly be more friendly or courteous. Unlike their counterparts in North Africa, merchants in the souk do not harass browsers, nor do self-appointed guides press themselves upon visitors. Road blocks are rare and virtually no westerner is known to have been mugged in Syria, let alone kidnapped.
For this remains a society in which crime is considered to bring shame upon the family of the perpetrator, and with the ubiquity of the Mukhabarat security apparatus, unlikely to go unpunished. As the Bradt Travel Guide drily observes, even honour crimes are few, and sure to relate to ancient blood feuds, thus unlikely to affect visitors.
damascus at night
This outlook seems set to change. Tom Marchant, co-founder of offbeat travel specialist Black Tomato, rates Syria ‘the single most intriguing known unknown among medium-haul destinations’, while another British tour operator reports bookings up 500 per cent in 12 months. The past three years have witnessed not only the opening of the first grande luxe hotel in Damascus, but a renaissance in the Old City. Its roots can be traced back to 2000 when a cosmopolitan lady from Aleppo, May Mamarbachi, acquired a decaying mercantile palace. After nearly two years of negotiations with various ministries she was permitted to convert it into Beit Al Mamlouka, an eight-room boutique hotel of Levantine charm.
“Such has been the quiet success of Beit Al Mamlouka that it has inspired the renovation of 20 or so other traditional houses, affording visitors a hotel experience richer and more authentic than to be found in the Gulf states.”
view from the balcony
Other decaying residences have been restored as restaurants, the interiors resembling the cave of Ali Baba; one, improbably, has become an internet cafe. So modest are prices that one can afford to splash out in the Souk al- Hamidiyya on Damascene brocade and backgammon boxes fashioned from rare woods inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Many young women go bareheaded here, and not only members of the well-tolerated Christian minority, whose denominations comprise about 10 per cent of the population. Those sporting Islamic scarfs are as likely to be wearing tight jeans as long coats. When I pause in the bazaar to watch ladies in hijabs negotiating with the (male) merchant at a lingerie booth, a passer-by hastens to explain, they are not Syrian, but Iranian tourists. Usually they just go to the ruins and the mosque.
“The courtesies of bargaining are best conducted here over a shared argileh – a waterpipe, enjoyment of which undergoes a respectful intermezzo during the muezzin’s call to prayer.”
Such customs reflect the continuity of life in Syria, a country that, despite having its share of gimcrack modern buildings in the cities, has yet to undergo the dislocation of traditional life experienced elsewhere in the region, despite a rapidly rising population and an influx of refugees from Iraq.
sweet tea in the boudoir
At a time when religious persecution prevails in much of the region, the toleration of minorities speaks persuasively in Syrian favour. A week before, when encountering the first fury of the sandstorm, we had sought temporary shelter in the Baghdad Café, an outpost of Hitchcockian remoteness off the road to Iraq. The interior resembled the tent of a Bedouin sheriff, the main concessions to visitors being a rack of postcards, a centurion’s helmet of uncertain provenance and the inevitable iron stove on which coffee was brewing. Departing after the storm had abated sufficiently to allow driving, Ahmad, the owner, had refused payment for our refreshments. ‘You are our honoured guests,’ he had said. Words that were to be echoed throughout Syria. But a rum way to run a catering enterprise nevertheless.
The best times to visit Syria are mid-March to late May and September to November, avoiding summer heat and winter snow. Black Tomato can arrange a four night stay B&B (based on two people sharing), including hotels, flights from London, guides and drivers, starts from around £875 per person.
You can see more on our seeking enchantment? Head to Syria experience.
