Everyone invites you to dinner in Damascus. One warm night in the Old City, we stood with friends on a tiny street in the Jewish Quarter, trying to figure out where to find the one synagogue still functioning. An elderly neighbor who wandered past stopped to help, and for 15 minutes chatted in Arabic with our friends – describing the history of the Jewish community, reminiscing how sad it was they had all left, inquiring about our trip, and of course inviting us to his home for dinner.
We had to decline. If we stopped for dinner with everyone who asked, we’d never have seen half of the city.
But we followed his directions, and found the locked synagogue on a tiny stub street near our hotel. The whitewashed walls on both sides led to an unremarkable metal gate with no sign – so much for sightseeing. Yet we poked our heads around the side, where a footpath kept going. Why not see where it went?
The stone path, narrow enough to touch the walls on either side, meandered around the synagogue and through a low apartment building, made a sharp right under someone’s home, cut through a family’s courtyard where dinner was being served – they were surprised to see us, but wished us well – and eventually spat us out through an anonymous passageway onto a tributary of Straight St., the Old City’s main drag.
Damascus is like that: It swallows you whole, a swirl of sights and smells that rewards aimless exploring while taking you only slightly astray. Fine hotels and restaurants are hidden away behind anonymous doors; storytellers and poets sing for European tourists while modern jazz groups play for crowds of hip young Damascenes. The crafts and fabrics and antiques for sale along tiny avenues are gorgeous and affordable; galleries like sculptor Mustafa Ali‘s studio and the Art House cultural center give foreign students learning Arabic a place to meet and mingle with the artistic leaders of one of the Arab world’s cultural capitals.
Armies have fought over Damascus for 5,000 years. Romans, Arabs and Turks all left their marks inside the gates of the Old City, where a Roman temple of Jupiter stands across from the gleaming Umayyad Mosque, and where cultures still rub up against each other. The government is officially secular, and while Islam dominates, a smaller but thriving Christian community is fully engaged in civil society. Most of the Jews left in recent years, revitalizing parts of Brooklyn but leaving behind the dark shells of empty homes; anywhere from a few dozen to a few hundred remain, living quietly.
What is most jarring to American eyes – aside from the omnipresent images of Syria‘s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, glaring out from every flat surface – is the way humdrum modern life goes on amid all the dusty history. The central souk sprawls through ancient passageways and into graceful plazas lined with Parisian-style ironwork; women veiled from head to toe shop for clothes, soap and spices from stalls lined against centuries-old mosques and churches. Our friends took us one night to hear the national orchestra play outside town in the ruins of a Roman theater at Bosra; the stone walls echoed with the chatter of music students, while lighting and sound cables threaded the corridors built millennia ago.
To get some perspective on the city – and to get away from its stifling, polluted air – we took a taxi to the top of Mount Qassioun, where small cafes and ice cream parlors line the roadway, each offering its own slice of the skyline over the city.
Families sit on the parapet, smoking hookahs and making tea on the sidewalk; young couples find dark corners away from the streetlights, still careful not to touch in a reserved culture. Looking over the city, our friends pointed out the landmarks and noted the green lights atop every mosque – the more religious the neighborhood, the more points of green lit up the night.
Syria is carefully evaluating its place in the world, pulled by contrary forces. Washington considers the country a state sponsor of terrorism for its support of Hezbollah, and recently launched a commando raid just across the Iraqi border. Assad, far more broad-minded than his murderous father, has taken steps to improve relations with the West, yet a growing conservative sector of his populace looks approvingly at Iran.
The crowd at the symphony, drawn from society’s elite, wore tight jeans and sleeveless tops; on the streets of Damascus our friends pointed out more and more women hidden under head scarves and shrouds.
For American travelers like us, today’s tensions couldn’t help but color the city’s charms. We never felt snubbed or worried during our week in Syria; border guards and hotel clerks never raised an eyebrow at our passports. Everywhere we went, people were thrilled to meet Americans – or at least to see us visiting their country – even though a few greeted us with an initial chill before denouncing our policies and our President.
Walking up Straight St. one day, we stopped to gawk at the Damascus version of Monopoly for sale in a shop window. A man stopped, happy to practice his English with us, and soon gave us a tour of his nearby mosque. He was praising the charitable work of Hezbollah and bragging about how many refugees they sheltered during Israel‘s 2006 attacks on Lebanon, when he thought to ask us where we were from. We told him.
He paused, offered us seats in the office and turned on the air conditioner. He called his wife; we could make out the word “American” in their conversation. Then he sat down, apologized for being blunt, and launched a long diatribe about American policy in the Middle East – all the while careful to say he wasn’t blaming us personally.
“Mountains cannot move closer together,” he said. “So people have to move between the mountains.”
Then he invited us to dinner.
