Damascus: the Old City

Damascus is a city so ancient and fabled that I almost feel as if my observations are inadequate, though they are honest. This is a place whose streets have seen thousands of years of travelers, pilgrims, invaders, holy men, merchants, scholars, and writers of every stripe. Mark Twain remarked in "Innocents Abroad" that "No recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive news of it." I'm not sure that's quite the case, but in three days of prowling the alleys of marketplaces, juice sellers, daunting mosques and serenely undisturbed churches, it did feel as if history had left much of Damascus to its own devices. The pulse of the city seemed to propel a body at once very ancient and very timeless, something that had struck me throughout my Syrian travels. Part of it was the fact that politics were a forbidden topic, and the Hafez regime has silenced not just dissent but religious activism of all kinds. Still, this governmental repression gave an ironic amount of breathing room for a fragile yet very boisterous form of cultural pluralism. On my first evening, I enjoyed a strong coffee in the shadows of the imposing Ummayad Mosque, disappearing into the throngs of Shiite pilgrims as I wound my way back to my hotel. Then as night grew later, I found refuge in a small one room tavern run by a pair of Christian brothers, chain smoking cigarettes and opening tops on long bottles of beer. The pictures of Bashar Assad and his father were everywhere to be sure, but their very ubiquity rendered them almost powerless to me, the causal traveler. Rather than a sense of Orwellian surveillance, the constant reminder of the heavy hand of the Assads engendered no more emotional response in me than would a cavalcade of suburban corporate logos, be they Starbucks or McDonald's.