Syria : Warm Welcomes, Damascus to Aleppo

The blue light of dusk had already begun to settle over this ancient city when we spotted the sign. We sprinted across the rush hour traffic, ignoring the honking taxis. “Look!” we shouted to each other as we pointed at the words overhead: “Saad Kayal, M.D.” The family name in lights. And a doctor, too!

My roots brought me to Syria, but I had as little idea what to expect as any other American. I grew up a mall-going, Long Island girl and have none of the dark, sultry features that I associated with Syrians (wrongly, as I soon found out). And I always cringed slightly when someone linked me to that troublesome dictatorship bordering Iraq. I speak no Arabic, and my father and my uncle have forgotten most of theirs. Being a Syrian American meant only that I knew how to concoct a number of wonderful dishes, and that I had a box full of gold bangles and a jangly pair of filigree earrings from Aleppo, the city of my paternal grandparents.

But when my sittau --my grandmother--died two years ago, severing our last link to Arab culture, my uncle decided that he and I should go scratch around the family’s ancestral stamping grounds.

Our journey began last October, just days after the world cheered a historic and unexpected peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (an agreement that Syria did not back then, and silently threatened to scuttle). Two Americans going to the demon Middle East? Were we crazy? Our friends thought so, and their most frequent parting remark--”Be careful”--only unsettled us more.

Our misgivings melted as soon as we touched down in Damascus. The crimeless streets (one of the benefits of a dictatorship) were full of European tourists--Germans, French and British who apparently hadn’t heard that this was a dangerous vacation spot. Most of the Syrians were eager to greet us and practice their English, the second language that appeared on many of the signs throughout the country. On our first day, an attendant at the dusty, artifact-filled National Museum was so happy to meet some Americans firsthand that he gave us eight postcards “for friendship.” A boy of about 11 ran up to us in the street to ask where we were from. “Welcome to our country,” he said. Those were the words we would hear most often during our two-week stay.

In addition to a warm welcome, Syria offers cities with cosmopolitan bustle and a 1930s charm, spectacular desert landscapes and ancient ruins straight out of an archeologist’s dream. The travel is rugged and the word “luxury” has a slightly different meaning, but for adventurers who don’t mind earthiness, the payoffs are well worth it.

In Damascus, which claims to be the oldest inhabited city on earth (some say 9,000 years old), the air swells with music and perfume. Four times a day, and once more at sunset, the hypnotic call to prayer, “Allah akbar” (“God is Great”) floats up from the city’s 250 mosques and beats softly against the sawdust-brown hills that border the city. Fragrances that I had known only in my sittau’s home--grilled lamb, mint, sweet, thick cardamom-scented coffee--unfurl through the streets and mingle with the sweet jasmine that grows everywhere.

To see the rest of the country and find our way 200 miles north to Aleppo, we hired a taxi, as we’d been told was the custom even for long distances. Our 72-year-old driver, Essmayel, who spoke English well and had two gold incisors, took his duty seriously.

“You have come to see your country,” he said. “You shall see everything you want!” He’d told us that in Syria “there is a ruin every 25 centimeters.” He seemed determined that we should see them all.

*

After two days of climbing around ruins in southern Syria, we piled into Essmayel’s 1983 yellow Nissan at 6 a.m. We would head east across the desert about 150 miles to Palmyra, where Queen Zenobia--Syria’s answer to Cleopatra--had dared to challenge Rome.

We were the only ones on the road, save an occasional truck filled with red peppers or pomegranates usually coming down the middle lane in the opposite direction. Essmayel’s wife had come along and, like every good sittau , she kept us well-supplied with apples, almond bars, sweet pistachio cakes and cardamom-flavored bubble gum. She also brought a Coleman vacuum bottle full of ice water that we cracked open just before the desert began.

Syria’s tarred strip of highway cuts the wide plain like a river. Mud-packed mountains with jagged rock atop swell in the distance like giant ant hills. They made us feel like a board-game-sized car driving through a diorama.

Dust and road grit covered our windshield, our sunglasses, our teeth. But somewhere around mile 100 of the Cham Desert, the hard-packed earth gives way to lush olive groves, grape vines and fields of wheat and cotton. Essmayel poked me in the ribs and yelled, “This is Syria!” He waved his hand out the window and swept it across the plain where irrigation pumps and pipeline-sized concrete troughs carry precious water all the way to the horizon. “Big tractors,” Essmayel said, “make it like California!”

The desert is full of such surprises. Contradictions cluster so close together they become difficult to comprehend: Cave dwellings lay 100 yards from condos; robed Bedouins ride tractors. A few miles further, a woman in a chador, the traditional Muslim dress, stood hitchhiking.

We passed the only herd of camels we would see as we drew near Palmyra. The 1960s version of the American song “The Name Game” came on the radio mixed with the smell of a cucumber being peeled in the back seat.

Palmyra appears through the dust like a handful of pink amethyst strewn across the sand. The rosy skeleton of the city is so well-preserved that you can easily visualize the bustle of the 80,000 merchants and businessmen who made it the capital of the spice and silk trade nearly 2,000 years ago.

*

The mile-long main avenue lies like a parade route toward the hilltop citadel that cracks the sapphire sky. It seems as if it has all of its original 300 columns (though less than half remain), and pieces of the limestone roadway still bear the grooves of wagon wheels. Intact facades of long-gone shops lie just outside the columns. The trail of history at Palmyra, though, is most visible at the Temple of Bel, whose monstrous pillars and sacrificial table stand side by side with remnants of a mosque, built on a church, built on a pagan temple.

Palmyra had its greatest day in the 3rd Century, when Queen Zenobia proclaimed the kingdom’s independence from Rome (after helping to assassinate her husband, some believe). She conquered all of Syria and lower Egypt and was preparing to go further when the Romans arrived and carted her off--in gold chains, no less. With her departure, Palmyra soon became nothing more than a faded frontier town.

Near sunset, we climbed to the citadel, accompanied part of the way by a Bedouin boy who played his reed for us. Standing in the cusp of the hill, something Essmayel had said suddenly made sense to me. When I had asked him how the pain and hatred between Israel and the Arabs could be overcome to bring the new peace--which everyone we spoke to said they wanted--he responded: “We have a great history. We understand such things.”

I had stewed over those words for days. But it was only as I watched the remains of almyra below us begin to glow red that I understood what Essmayel had meant. In this part of the world, even the most pitched battles merge in the swirl of history, where they mellow and eventually become part of the landscape.

A few days before Israel released 700 Palestinians as a concession to peace, we set out for the final leg of our journey to Aleppo.

*

Two hours west of Palmyra, we stopped at the Krak des Chevaliers, an imposing Crusaders castle standing hawklike on its perch above the landscape. It was overcome by 13th-Century Muslim forces who were smart enough to employ that old Trojan Horse trick: They sent a forged letter in the name of the defenders’ commander advising them to surrender. Then we turned north and stopped at Hamath, a ruin that’s only 12 years old.

Hamath is famous for its giant wooden waterwheels built in the Middle Ages to irrigate the city’s gardens and orchards. In 1982, it was all but destroyed by the tanks of Syrian President Hafez Assad, who bombarded the town to suppress a Muslim fundamentalist uprising. Of the city’s more than 30 waterwheels, only 10 remain. Their tattered planks rise along the shores of the Orontes River, but serve as little other than diving platforms for local teen-agers. A colossal statue of Assad marks the entrance to the city.

Assad, in fact, makes sure everyone remembers who’s boss by plastering his image all over the country. We caught three different profiles of him even before we got through customs. Assad sports a number of different looks: there’s the debonair “Belmondo” Assad, with half-cocked head and eyes squinting with laughter; the serious General Assad; angelic Assad with a gold corona, to name but a few. Some of these are enormous, backlit portraits with lights strung around them.

*

As the road continues north, the soil turns from dusty brown to rich red ochre. We passed pomegranate trees bending under their ruby weight as my uncle and Essmayel drilled me on my newly learned Arabic.

We started with personal pronouns. “Ana, Inta, he’a, who’a” (“I,” “you,” “she,” “he”). I practiced over and over. I had already begun to understand simple sentences without realizing it, as a part of my brain closed since childhood had suddenly opened. I hadn’t realized that I knew any Arabic at all, except for certain food words and the phrase “Ateeni bosi”-- “Give me a kiss”--a standard part of any grandchild’s lexicon. My uncle, who like my father had grown up speaking Arabic but now remembered only basic phrases, stared at me in amazement as I repeated to him in English bits of his rudimentary conversations with people.

The lessons ended around dusk on our approach to Aleppo. I reached back and squeezed my uncle’s hand in excitement. We stared out the window silently with butterflies in our stomachs as we noticed something we hadn’t seen in Damascus: white-painted metal terraces--filigreed, just like my earrings.

After checking into our hotel, we hurried down the tree-lined avenues toward the center of town. A right turn, a left turn, a right turn and suddenly the street opened onto a blue-lit boulevard, wide with fountains and sidewalk cafes.

My family early had weaned me from romantic visions of my grandfather’s pre-American life. When I was small, I thought that my giddau had ridden a camel, but I was informed that Giddau was from a city, and therefore most likely had never even seen a camel. Sittau’s parents had come from Aleppo even before Giddau, so no one had any information about their lives. That left me with no images to conjure.

But the jumble of Aleppo’s ancient history and cosmopolitan flair gave me some answers. Smartly dressed families pack the city’s restaurants and men fill the coffee houses, smoking four-foot-high water pipes as they play cards. The white-tiled pastry shops look like pizza joints, with customers yelling out orders and teen-age waiters hurrying to deliver stacks of rosewater sweets. Shops proffer shoes from Paris and finely made clothing. The tawdry bustle of Baron Street contrasts with the faded elegance of the 84-year-old Baron Hotel, where Lawrence of Arabia stayed and where, some say, 30 years ago guests could shoot ducks off the balcony. And although there had been 80 years between Giddau’s departure and my arrival, the 1957 Chevy taxi cabs let me know that things probably hadn’t changed all that much.

Dinner was another revelation. In southern Syria, we had begun to think that our relatives were the only Syrians who ate stuffed grape leaves hot and in tomato sauce. In Damascus, they serve the leaves cold, with olive oil (in the Greek fashion that most Americans know). But here in Halab, the Arabic name for Aleppo, they arrived steaming, just like Sittau’s. The other delights of Syrian cuisine-- babaghannouj (an eggplant dip), hummus (made from chick peas and garlic), tabbouleh (a parsley salad), kibbeh (fried lamb with wheat)--were the same as in Damascus, but with the addition of something special: mamuniyya . Mamuniyya is a childhood breakfast treat made from farina and sugar that Damascenes had curled their lips at when telling me they didn’t have it.

And then there was the medieval covered bazaar, the souk, a living contradiction to the sophistication of the cafe district. Imagine the frenzy of a street where a fire or earthquake is under way; that is what the souk is like. Rampaging donkeys and boys on bikes careen through the covered alleyways saddled with sacks of allspice and coffee. We wandered past stall after stall of red peppers, green beans, whole lambs, halves of lambs, eyes of lamb, every conceivable part of lamb and stopping to have coffee with a trader, who told us he had cousins in New Jersey.

Our new friend led us to the gold souk (the shopping areas are divided according to life’s basic needs: food, clothing and gold), where we bought a bangle by haggling the merchant to submission (“Sittau used to do this in Macy’s,” my uncle said to me, closing his eyes with remembered mortification). We stumbled out of the souk giggling like drunks and covered with a fine soot of cardamom, coffee and donkey dust. We squinted like moles in the sunlight as we made our way to the nearby citadel, which stands at the market’s end.

The next day, we decided to try to locate some family, although, after eight decades we knew the odds were slim. There were plenty of our namesakes about, however--one was the chief of police, we found out, and the others were apparently very wealthy.

What we found was a gravel-voiced former journalist, Giddau’s first cousin, who had the same distinctive jowls that I remember on my grandfather. We found him by asking after any Kayals at the Byzantine church where we figured my grandfather had been a member. One of the laymen led us through the winding alleyways of the Christian quarter, knocking on doors until we found the right family. Joseph Kayal greeted us with surprise and fondly referred to my grandfather, Mitchell, as “Mike.” We stayed for tea, took a photo of all of us together, then went back out into the city.

We left Aleppo two days later. We were eager to show my parents the photos of Giddau’s cousin, and yet, tracking our relatives had somehow seemed anti-climactic. We were far more excited about our photos of Palmyra and the Syrian children. As we drove back down the highway we’d come in on, we realized that we were only one small punctuation mark in the history of the land that claims to be the cradle of civilization, the beginning of everybody’s roots--even of our skeptical friends back home.

GUIDEBOOK

A Sortie to Syria

Getting there: From Los Angeles, Lufthansa offers daily service to Damascus through Frankfurt. TWA also connects to Damascus through various European cities. KLM has a weekly connection to Damascus through Amsterdam. Round-trip air fare on all carriers is $1,924 through May.

Getting around: Within the cities, the easiest way to travel is on foot or by taxi. Syria has friendly, honest cab drivers, and taxis are cheap (a ride across town in Damascus cost us about 50 cents).

For an inter-city driver, visit any of the dozens of travel agencies in the hotel districts of Damascus and Aleppo. Ten days of escorted private travel and round-trip transportation from Damascus to Aleppo cost us $660. In Aleppo, cruise down Baron Street and stop in at one of the agencies or go to the Tourist Office.

Karnak Tours and Transport operates daily tours to major cities and sites around Syria. In Damascus, tel. 221-492 or 226-136; in Aleppo, 210-248).

Where to stay: In Damascus, we stayed at the the Omayad Hotel (4 Brasil St., P.O. Box 7811, Damascus, Syria; from the U.S., telephone 011-963-11-21-77-00). Doubles begin at $70 with breakfast. The Cham Palace (Maysaloun Street, P.O. Box 7570, Damascus; tel. 011-963-11-232-300), is a luxury Hilton-style affair. Doubles start at $155.

In Aleppo, the Tourism Hotel (Majd al-Din al Jabri, Aleppo, Syria; tel. 011-963-21-210-156 or 210-158) is dull looking but full of 1930s ambience. Doubles begin at $48 with breakfast. The Hotel Baron (P.O. Box 130, Aleppo; 011-963- 21-221-0880, fax 221-8164) has run-down nostalgic charm, complete with rotating ceiling fans. Doubles: $31 with breakfast.

For more information: For visas ($15) and other information, contact the Embassy of the Syrian Arab Republic, Tourist Information Department, 2215 Wyoming Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20008; tel. (202) 232-6313.