In Damascus, Plenty of History--Few Visitors : Tourism: Wars and political isolation have taken their toll. But recent overtures to the West may open the city up.

In this ancient city, with all its historic shrines and relics of civilizations gone by, tourists can’t find a shop selling T-shirts with catchy slogans touting the place.

One reason--there aren’t many tourists to sell them to.

Not that there’s nothing to see. Damascenes like to call their town the world’s oldest inhabited city. The tomb of the Muslim conqueror Saladin, scourge of the Crusaders, is just around the corner from the shrine inside the Ommayed Mosque that is said to contain the head of John the Baptist.

St. Paul walked once walked it streets. Nebuchadnezzar, Alexander the Great and Cyrus of Persia all seized the city in their time. A Turkish bath built in the 7th Century is still operating.

But nowhere in the jumble of Damascus, a city of 4 million people, can you find a vendor selling shirts that say things like, “My parents went to . . . and all I got was this lousy T-shirt.”

Middle East wars and Syria’s political isolation saved Damascus from those ersatz curios. The tourism boom of the 1970s and ‘80s wasn’t even a whimper here.

Damascus’ pleasant seclusion could end soon, since Syria is cozying up to the West in hope of economic aid and an Arab-Israeli peace agreement. But even without hordes of tourists, you’d hardly call Damascus unspoiled.

Just the aura of political intrigue precludes that. And the shopkeepers know precisely how high to set prices to be haggled down to a “bargain” on Persian carpets and the wooden boxes inlaid with mother of pearl that are Damascene specialties.

Damascus has a dash of French flavor from its colonial past, and it just got its first American-style fast-food restaurant. Discarded plastic shopping bags--the litter of the West--drift along the streets on a dusty desert wind from the East.

That is fitting when you consider the description of Damascus by Kassem Toueir, director of the National Museum’s Center of Archeological Research, as “the key to the gate between two continents.”

The evidence of Europe meeting Asia is everywhere.

The Ommayed Mosque, built in the 8th Century, stands opposite the surviving columns of a Roman temple to Jupiter. The mosque itself is testament to the succession of races and religions that have coursed through Damascus over the centuries.

The site was originally a temple dedicated to Hadah, the chief deity of the Aramaeans, nomads who settled here in the 13th Century BC. The Romans converted it into a temple to Jupiter. The Byzantines later built a cathedral named after John the Baptist and finally, in the 7th Century, the conquering Arabs made it a mosque.

Toueir seems most comfortable talking about the old city, dating from the first Muslim conquest in the 7th Century in the “Golden Age, when Damascus ruled an empire stretching from the Atlantic to the border of China.”

“Damascus is the best preserved old city in the Middle East,” he says proudly, noting that new streets have cut through historic areas in both Cairo and Baghdad.

Not in Damascus. A maze of alleys and courtyards spreads out from the square around the Ommayed Mosque. The gold market, the spice market, shops for Damascene brocades, workshops where the tap of hammers is heard as craftsmen pound silver and gold designs into brass trays.

George Nassan, the 81-year-old patriarch of an old merchant family, believes Damascus still makes the Middle East’s best crafts: inlaid boxes and tables, silk brocade, curved Arab swords.

He laments that sales have plunged since the days before the 1967 Middle East War, when tourists made a regular circuit from Jerusalem to Beirut to Damascus.

Nassan’s factory employed 300 men then. Now he has 20 workers.

“During the last war (Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait) we didn’t see a single stranger,” Nassan says.

He is hoping that new U.S. efforts to bring peace to the Middle East will succeed and tourists will return.

Nassan leads visitors through his factory’s workshop to his family’s old home around a courtyard. “The palace,” he calls it, and the name fits. The walls and ceilings were intricately tiled and painted 200 years ago and have been lovingly restored.

The rich house behind the simple workshop is a little like Damascus, where things are not always what they seem.

Like the Street Called Straight, which isn’t.

It has taken a few jogs since the Bible’s Acts 9:11 recorded God commanding Ananias to “go into the Street Called Straight and inquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul of Tarsus.” Ananias laid his hands on Saul, who was cured of his blindness and became the Apostle Paul.

Finally, there’s the story of Damascus’ sobriquet as the oldest city still inhabited.

Toueir notes that the Armana tablets date the city to at least the 14th Century BC. But he adds that there is evidence that Aleppo, in northern Syria, still very much inhabited, is 400 years older. Still, some say Damascus is older yet.