Syria continues to burn and bleed, and there seems no sign of it all coming to an end. Things, in fact, seem to be going only from bad to worse. I can hardly recognise it from the current news reports, which seem to talk of a totally different country from the one I visited some 20 years ago.
I was on my way back from Delhi to London, where I was then a student, and Syrian Airlines was one of the cheapest ways to fly out to the west, an option generally preferred by low-budget travellers like myself. I was in no hurry to get back to university and I thought a stopover in Syria would be fun. I applied for and got a Syrian visa, excitedly packed my bags and hopped onto the flight to Damascus.
Damascus was then a small but neatly-planned city, easily negotiated on foot. I checked into one of the cheaper funduqs or lodges in the heart of town, where most of the historical sites are located — and there were many — for Damascus is said to be the oldest continuously-inhabited city in the world.
The remains of a wall dating back to Roman times, the Azam Palace and the sprawling Roman-style Masjid Umaviya, a church later converted into a mosque after the seventh century Arab Muslim conquest and believed by some to house the head of John the Baptist, were among the major sites in Old Damascus. In addition to these were numerous tombs, historical graveyards and hamams or Turkish-style bathhouses, some of them centuries old. And then there was the delightful Christian quarter, which dates back to much before the arrival of Islam in the region, with numerous old, Oriental-style churches. Just outside Damascus were some Christian villages, whose homes were little holes carved into the face of mountain walls and whose inhabitants were about the only folks left who still spoke Aramaic, the language Prophet Jesus used.
I did the mandatory monument-hopping around/of these sites, but my fondest memories remain of the serpentine lanes of the Souq al-Hamidiya, an enormous Ottoman-period market spread over dozens of covered lanes and straight out of the Arabian Nights. Hundreds of shops did brisk business, selling giant bottles of perfume, enormous Persian rugs, mountains of olives, bricks of sticky sweets, and delicately-carved furniture made of wood and mother-of-pearl. To my surprise, I noted numerous stalls choked with handicrafts made in India, which were passed off, at a hefty profit I suppose, to unsuspecting western tourists as ‘traditional Syrian’ ware!
Damascus, as I recall it vaguely, seemed a relaxed place. Women dressed in the latest western fashions nudged against others wrapped in black burqas. The pavements of busy roads were crowded with men sipping coffee, playing backgammon and smoking long-tailed sheeshas (the Arab counterpart of the Indian hookah). Most people I met were friendly and warm. With the language barrier — very few people know English and I knew next to nothing of Arabic — my conversations were limited, but that did not deter an Iranian carpet-weaver from inviting me to have dinner with him and spend the night at his home (which I excitedly accepted) and a Christian nun from agreeing to let me leave most of the money I was carrying with her in safe custody before I set off for the troubled Kurdish-inhabited north of the country.
Yet, the political repression was readily apparent. Giant posters of the then dictator Hafiz al-Assad draped almost every government building, and I was warned not to discuss politics. People seemed well-fed on the whole, though poverty seemed widespread and talking about it was discouraged. Even mentioning political Islam, which even then was a problem, was definitely an anathema, and I don’t remember seeing more than just a few Muslim men with long beards, probably because that would easily have been interpreted as an anti-regime statement. It was obvious that in Syria, as in other Arab countries, there was no political freedom at all.
I did the rounds of various other towns that my guide-book insisted I visit: Homs, with its ancient churches and mosques, Aleppo, with its sprawling citadel and many traditional bazaars, and Palmyra, in the heart of the Syrian desert, with its fascinating ruins (tombs, stadiums, temples, forts, palaces and more) that record an amazingly long history — Aramaic, Roman, Greek, Christian and early Islamic. I trailed off the beaten tourist track and headed deep into the mountainous region up north, to Qamishle and up to the Turkish border, an area inhabited by the Kurds, a minority group that suffered heavy repression from the Syrian government. There wasn’t much to see in terms of historical monuments there, but the people were very different from the Arab majority. They had a distinct dress, and their language, which belongs to the Indo-Aryan group, had interesting commonalities with Hindi (which meant making conversation with the folks I met somewhat less difficult than with other Syrians). The Kurds seemed a jolly, boisterous people, but the climate of fear and suspicion was palpable, with a heavy military presence across the area.
That fortnight in Syria was easily one of the most memorable holidays I ever treated myself to. From the news of the war that keeps pouring in every day I can hardly recognise it now though.
The writer is an Indian freelance journalist