A House in Damascus - Before the Fall Read online

  Almost two hundred years earlier, another traveller expressed disappointment as he turned off Straight Street into yet another lane:

  A narrow street lined with houses built of unburnt brick on each hand, and we were so much disappointed by their mean, and even ruinous appearance, that we began to suspect that travellers, in calling this a terrestrial paradise, really meant to pun on the material of which it is built.5

  All this time later, it was hard to see why because this really was magical, a walk with history ending each day in a house with a past now masquerading as a hotel. Regrettably, though, the holiday combined with high season meant a limited booking, but that prompted relocation to an even more marvellous boutique hotel over in the Christian Quarter, an early lesson in how a very small distance could mark a very large cultural shift.

  By the time that holiday period ended, I had walked most inches of the Old City in this strangely deserted mode that, in some ways, provided the best possible introduction. Gawking at roofs was possible, so was walking up the tiniest of alleyways to see where they went. The geography began falling into place (apart from the Jewish Quarter that would take a bit longer). Landmarks began appearing. The calls from the different mosques began distinguishing themselves one from another. People now appeared to come from very different places and groups. The "knowledge" began, about where best to find taxis, a SIM card, basic supplies, bakeries, restaurants, the tourist traps to avoid (but only after falling in a couple of times), where might constitute off-the-beaten track, when best to go to the Mosque, where to buy a shirt in Bab Touma on a public holiday.

  The overriding sensation about the Old City was the depth of its history and who might have passed by this very spot previously at, for example, the remains of the Roman temple wall just along from the souk on the way to the ATM in Hariqa. Who else had walked around the back of the mosque on the way through the Shia section? Who else had visited the khans built around the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to serve the caravans along their trade routes? Looking out from the roof terrace of the Al Khawali restaurant, it was easy to recall to that some of the most famous figures of earlier times had lingered beneath the domes of the nearby Khan Ahmed Pasha. This was, indeed, a magical place, and would become more so.

  Not A Palace

  ~

  The agent described the first place as a "palace". It was tucked up a side street near the Shia Quarter, the enticing suggestion being that a neighbour was one of the Jumblatt political bosses from Lebanon who had spent a fortune restoring his house to original condition. That seemed unlikely. Walid Jumblatt, although married to the daughter of a former Syrian Defence Minister, was by now reckoned an opponent of Bashar al-Assad. The veracity of the claim was impossible to confirm by visual sighting, because by definition Damascene houses, like all Arabic ones, turn in rather than out. A door in a wall opens into an open courtyard around which the house is built, usually on two or three levels. In the middle of the courtyard larger houses will have a fountain, but smaller places frequently do not.

  The "palace" proved less than that. It had a nice courtyard with a bright fountain, but was a poor house: a couple of sitting rooms downstairs, a tiny kitchen, dim light. Up off a landing was the bathroom, again tiny, and on the final level two bedrooms renovated in uninspiring fashion. It was a quick fix to hit the market—at a price. The owner was asking SYP 125,000, about $2,800 per month at that stage, so almost $100 per day. Given that a boutique hotel would match that rate long term, it was no deal. Moreover, it prompted unsettling concerns about what other properties might be like, and just how much this enterprise was really going to cost.

  Next morning's offering was even better, said the agent—presumably a grand palace—but at lower price. A much lower price. It was near the agent's own house off Quemariye, the main walking and car route from Bab Touma to the Umayyad Mosque, and really in the middle of the Old City. The location was good. So was the door in the anonymous wall. The courtyard was big but the fountain gone. Maybe that was why the price was lower. This house was renovated, too, but botched. A gloomy sitting room adjoined an even gloomier tiny kitchen. A sitting room had an unpainted, thin plywood sliding door shoved across it to make a second bedroom. Upstairs lay a bathroom and another bedroom that was alright, but just. This was SYP 75,000 a month so better, but no bargain.

  The hotel checkout date was looming now, and the pressure to find somewhere growing in an unknown city. Being in the Old City was mandatory, why come to Damascus otherwise? The diplomatic and upmarket suburbs of Abou Roumaneh and Shaalan were all very well and closer to the office, but hardly unique. This was the oldest inhabited city in the world, so why be anywhere other than the Old City? The guidebooks and websites all claimed that finding apartments and houses was simple, almost a matter of simply standing on a corner and announcing your need. Announce it and they will come. It was not working like that, however, and time was pressing.

  The hotel manager had feelers out, too, so the next inspection was of a set of rooms overlooking Straight Street in the Christian Quarter. The anonymous door off the street led down into a huge courtyard with a substantial fountain. Up on a landing were the three bedrooms, a bathroom, and a kitchen-sitting area that looked down into the courtyard and ran across the front of all three bedrooms. Normally it was leased to three female foreigners at a time, Arabic language students come to Damascus. There were hundreds of these then in the city at any given time. However, the woman head of the house was persuaded that the professor from Australia was old and harmless—thanks for that—so set aside her normal policy, reasoning that one person producing the same amount of income as three was a better and more cost effective deal for her. That would be $1,000 a month, all laundry included.

  It was a nice place, they were nice people, and it was tempting. If Damascus is the oldest inhabited city then, surely, Straight Street must be one of the oldest inhabited streets. Via Recta was laid in Roman times and effectively runs through the middle of the entire Old City. It starts at Souk Medhat Pasha, some of which is under cover and, through the day, closed to traffic. The road then heads towards the Roman Arch that now marks the divide between the Muslim and Christian Quarters. Through here nut sellers mix with watchmakers, key cutters, carpet shops and the all-encompassing "Orientals" providers whose goods range from antiques to Bashar al-Assad key rings. From there the street becomes Bab Sharqi, for the gate of the same name that leaves the Old City at its other end. Some higher quality artisans have shops along here and in nearby feeder streets.

  The rooms were just into the Christian Quarter, but not quite right. While there is a lot of genuine Damascus along Straight Street it is really a tourist haunt, and frequently there were far more foreigners than locals present. Ironically enough, most of the foreign language students reside in the Christian Quarter, and Straight Street especially has become almost neutralised. Was there any point in coming to the Old City then escaping from it? There were practicalities to consider, too. At night and especially at the weekends—Thursday night to Saturday night in the Arab world—Straight Street was also "car display" street for people heading to the restaurants and bars, because the Christian Quarter has the most alcohol outlets in Damascus. That meant noise, and the rooms literally hung over Straight Street. Reluctantly, it was a "no".

  By now there was one choice left, and one day left to decide. The agent set out from his shop, near where Quemariye takes a small shimmy down towards the back of the Mosque, and set off up the gentle slope heading towards Straight Street. He turned right into a narrower lane down past Jabri House, the most famous of Old City restaurants. On the left were some antique shops. By now heading towards the souk, he turned sharply into a very narrow laneway with steps leading up, the walls of the houses on either side leaning towards each other. It was unquestionably exotic, confirmed weeks later by a European couple taking photographs of "mysterious laneways in Old Damascus" up the steps towards the house. Stopping at an innocuous and weather-beat
en door, the agent discovered he had the wrong key. We were opposite a small landing space with a bicycle left over from the 1920s that stood under a window covered with cardboard. A few minutes later his brother arrived with the right key, the door opened.

  Immediately inside the door, on the left of a dark alley roofed by the second level of the house, was a toilet, an Arabic toilet, a squattie in traveller language. This was the only house I had ever seen where the toilet was the first feature encountered inside the front door. A couple of further steps up on the left came a disused wash-house, and what looked like a broom cupboard containing a washing machine obviously used last in the previous millennium. That broom cupboard looked onto a small, tiled courtyard with one corner covered in pot plants. No fountain. Above the courtyard the sky was clear blue, the early autumn sun shining warmly. The kitchen, apparently unused for some time, stood opposite the alley and contained a gas stove with attached cylinder, a fridge stood up on blocks, cupboards stuffed with enormous jars of olives in brine, and several layers of dust. Two other rooms were on this level. One was in an L shape, formed from two previously separate rooms. This was a big sitting room with a bed at one end, and two doors at each end accessing the courtyard. The other was a second sitting room done in Muslim style with framed quotations from the Quran on the walls, some sitting cushions on the floor, and little else apart from a small side table supporting two vases of dried flowers.

  Next to the kitchen, a set of stairs wound upwards in three sections. At the bottom of the second section a handmade but sturdy wooden ladder was propped against the wall to provide access to the clothesline on top of the kitchen roof. At the top, the stairs opened to a big landing. On one side were two bedrooms, on the other a further unused storage room which featured an unplumbed "French" (or western) toilet. Next to that came a large bathroom, for want of a more accurate word.

  The place was old, original (meaning not renovated), dusty, and full of the owners stuff. I loved it. It had character. It was a house in Damascus in the best sense of those words. It was truly in the Old City. Just one hundred metres from the Umayyad Mosque and only slightly further to the Souk Hamidiyeh complex, it was also just ten minutes walk from the Christian Quarter. There was a deliberation about the squattie, though. It was a long time back to postgraduate days in India and elsewhere in Asia, and some of those memories were unpleasant. The I-phone conversation with Australia, though, determined that this was a small matter in the broader cosmos and would, indeed, be a necessary part of the experience. Besides, the thighs would become stronger and, after all, it was a flush squattie.

  So it became the House in Damascus. But only after several ATM trips to acquire the requisite cash because no credit cards or cheques were involved—as a Kiwi colleague at another project place and time was told, "better to have no record!" Predictably, shifting in was eventful. The place was to have been cleared and cleaned, but was not. The owner ended up shoving spare timber from behind the door of one of the upstairs rooms into the nearby storage room, joining the unplumbed toilet. Clothes and belongings were flung into plastic bags but, by agreement, some were crammed into other spaces. Buckets of water were thrown about to disperse the dust of several vacant weeks, and there was much huffing and puffing about whether or not it was acceptable. It was, even if behind a bedroom door there still remained a magnificently rescued old Damascene door. That was very welcome to stay.

  The owner and the agent left, and it was now dark. A ladder, not the wooden one, gave access to the roof, a dusty patio featuring the water tank. It was clear, the stars were out, and the backdrop was the slope of Mount Qassioun with the lights of its suburbs and mosques standing out clearly. And squarely in the foreground ran the south wall of the great Umayyad Mosque with the Minaret of Qait Bey at the far end, the Dome of the Eagles in the middle and, closest, the Jesus Minaret, all three lit and glimmering. It seemed touchable. This house came with a presence.

  The Jesus Minaret

  ~

  Out the door and down to the bottom of the steps, turn left then right while walking about 130 metres, and there is the massive southern wall of the Great Umayyad Mosque, generally ranked number four in the Islamic pantheon behind Mecca, Medina, and the Dome of the Rock. In 708, just a century or so on from the Prophet's work and the taking of Damascus in 636 by the Caliphs, the Christians were persuaded to turn over their church in return for gaining control over other church sites in the Christian quarter, and the transformation began. The work was long and expensive, and there may have been as many as 12,000 workers involved in creating this magnificent mosque out of a church on a site that formerly hosted pagan then Greek and Roman temples. In the walls now may be seen huge Roman blocks and traces of all the precedent cultures. Despite trials and tribulations and fires, the Umayyad Mosque now essentially is that which emerged in the 7th century, although some of the mosaic work has long disappeared.

  It is huge, one hundred and twenty two metres by fifty in the courtyard which is paved with shimmering pink marble that shows up subtly in photographs. The walls under the covered ways are filled with elaborate mosaics, and the roof arches tower what seem like hundreds of feet above. The Dome of the Clocks and the Treasury building are exquisite, the latter perched on four perfect marble pillars, and decorated in the green and gold mosaics that characterise the whole space. All this is dominated by the enormous façade that frames the Dome of the Eagles, focusing attention towards the interior and the site of the mihrab, the main prayer spot marking the way towards Mecca.

  Along the eastern wall stands the hall that contains the shrine for Hussein, the son of Ali, grandson of the Prophet and great martyr for the Shia. Many Shiites believe his head is buried here, others that it was displayed here by his conquerers to humiliate his followers. It is a tiny area and, in truth, worn from the constant attention it gets daily from the Shia faithful who flock there before moving on to the nearby Ruqayya Mosque.

  The Umayyad Mosque prayer hall is a massive, vaulted space well over one hundred metres long and splendidly wide, carpeted and sparsely furnished apart from the formal prayer sites. The Dome itself sails high, decorated in splendid mosaics. The focal points are the mihrab, and what is said to be the tomb of John the Baptist. That is in a beautiful domed and latticed tower, marking where his head is supposed to have been brought after his execution in Palestine. Whether that happened or not is a moot point, but everyday people still come to venerate the marble tomb that dates only from the 1890s—the original was replaced after a massive fire swept through the mosque.

  In many respects this is just a vast, empty space sprawling behind its high walls and heavy gates. Yet it carries the full gravitas of its thirteen hundred years and seems surprisingly modern. In some sections it is modern, restoration and rebuilding recurring after crises throughout its history. One of its many great secrets is that even on a crowded day, the individual can still find enough seclusion for either prayer and/or contemplation within the throng. And the throng, it should be said, was just like the one that buys indulgences at Sacre Coeur or begrudgingly places coins in the "gift" boxes at places like Winchester or Durham. People were on their cellphones: "I am just at the Umayyad Mosque". Others contorted around those phones to somehow get a photograph of themselves entering the Mosque, standing in front of the mihrab, or the finbar from whence imams dispense wisdom and exhortation. Some visitors slept in a corner, exhausted by it all, undeterred by the whirring of fans and heaters trying to disperse moisture after rainfall or snow has sprung leaks. Kids raced around excitedly. Other people were off in the distance, quietly praying to their God, seeking serenity and guidance. Tour groups of black garbed figures traipsed around after guides holding aloft those signs that aid the directionless.

  This is not only the heartbeat of faith for Damascenes and Syrians, but for people from around the Islamic world. Every day, differently and brightly clothed devotees from Africa and Asia appeared, mixing with immaculately dressed imams who had brought th
eir people up from the country on a day trip. Many of these groups spent their time outside singing in prayer while waiting for the huge iron main gates to swing back and allow them a great life moment. Non-Muslim tourists walked about in awe, but in winter glad that they thought to wear two pairs of socks in which to walk about, because that marble is cold on shoeless feet, especially after the courtyard has been washed down in the cool chill of dawn.