Mining the Diaries 78: Syria 2010
Cillicia Hotel, Aleppo, 9th September 2010
Breakfast to the sound of laughing doves in the palms and rafters – a peaceful counter to the roar and bustle of traffic in Syria’s industrial capital. It’s a city of the very rich and very poor – the rich in ornate apartments and houses in new Aleppo, the poor crammed into the old city.
The itinerary has us at the Monastery of St Simeon today. So, out before eight o’clock by coach north west through a rocky and broken basalt landscape where tracks lead off to the Cities of the Dead – nearly 800 of them spread over a rugged area about 30km by 140 km. Speculation has put their decline down to plague, earthquakes, nomad incursions and religious persecutions. Research now suggests that they are the ghosts of prosperous communities devoted to wine and olive oil production and export in the 4th to 6th centuries, which were disrupted by wars between the Arabs and the Byzantines.
On through open rolling land (steppe), past an army camp, through a scruffy town (name unrecorded) and eventually the climb up pine-covered slopes to the Monastery. A beautiful site high up looking out over the valley, breeze soughing in the trees and still comparatively cool. St Simeon is St Simeon Stylites, who spent 36 years (c. 423-459) perched atop his column; the great monastery complex was raised as an imperial project in the decades after his death. Sacked by Fatimid armies from Egypt in 1017, it is the most famous of the Dead cities. Compact and intelligible as a historic place, it was imbued for us with a sense of peace from centuries of pilgrimage. We left at 10.30 as a cavalcade of coaches arrived – our early start made sense.
Back in Aleppo we visited the Citadel, which the guide book calls ‘a magnificent testament to Arab military architecture’. Doubtless it was impressive, but I now have no defining memories of it, except perhaps of some great iron-studded doors and a ramped walkway polished by the feet of centuries.
After an omelette lunch nearby with Judith and Andrew, we set off to find the ladies hammam, but without success. Giving up, we strolled through the souk, got more or less lost and took refuge in the Great Mosque, full of happy, holidaying families celebrating Eid. The tiles in the courtyard were burning hot and Nina cooled her feet in the ablutions fountain with the Syrian women, a figure in white (the obligatory gown provided by the Mosque) among the black-clad Syrians. Judith chatted to a woman sitting on the edge on the arcade; she said she is married to Andrew in reply to a genuine, friendly curiosity about us (she isn’t and wears her mother’s wedding ring to avoid inevitable questions). Children regarded us with a mixture of curiosity and amusement – and sometimes a disconcerting, questioning reserve bordering on suspicion.