The Syrian Observatory For Human Rights

Syria Before the War: Reminiscing on a Trip to Aleppo

The Taurus Express, from Istanbul to Aleppo, juddered along what had been the old Hejaz Railway, built by the Ottomans in the twilight of their rule with the aim of connecting Istanbul to Mecca. The sleeper, all blue and white, with sprawling Arabic letters that spelled out the equivalent of CFS—Chemins de fer Syriens—had an Arab attendant, a large mothering creature with kohled eyes. When we reached southeast Anatolia, our carriage was to separate from the rest of the train and continue across the border to Syria. As the train plunged deeper into Anatolia, we passed towns of honey-colored stone, each with a solitary minaret that cast a slim blue shadow over a blanket of snow.

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I was 25, traveling across the Islamic world to research my first book, and the first day and a half of the journey had been full of romance. I had quit my job at Time magazine in London six months before, in the spring of 2005. I was full of the spirit of men like Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin, who left the London Sunday Times Magazine to travel, cabling back: “Have gone to Patagonia.” If the English schoolboy traveler was one kind of model, V.S. Naipaul was another. He wrote “books of enquiry,” with the aim of dramatizing the core tensions of a society—its historical fissures, its heartbreak, its inner drama. What kind of traveler did I want to be? I don’t think I knew.

pA view of the mosque from the Throne Hall of the Aleppo Citadel which sustained damage in the war 2007p
A view of the mosque from the Throne Hall of the Aleppo Citadel, which sustained damage in the war, 2007

Manuel Vazquez

Just before the border, the earth turned red, a landscape of boulders and emerald grass. We were in the Levant, and spokes of biblical light broke through the rain-filled sky. The train was carrying Turkish soldiers now, and moments earlier two handsome men in blue berets, standing in the gangway of the next carriage, had shared an enormous joint with me before waving our train goodbye. A sign depicting the young dictator Bashar al-Assad beside Hafez al-Assad, his grim-visaged father, welcomed us to “Assad’s Syria.” Hafez had quashed the Hama uprising of 1982 with brutal force. It was rumored that he had set fire to the city’s sewer system to keep the rebels from escaping. The son, with his English wife, was meant to be a reformer.

The Aleppo I arrived in, on the night before Christmas Eve, was shrouded in a sleep that felt centuries old. I remember men in black-tasseled fezzes—the red flat-topped hats of the Ottomans that had been outlawed in modern Turkey—at the train station. We drove through rain-drenched streets to the palatial house of my host, an old-fashioned Syrian Christian, who greeted me at the top of the stairs in his bathrobe. His wife, a Syrian Danielle Steele of sorts, with blond-streaked cropped hair, wrote novels with titles such as Si Loin de l’Euphrate. Georges collected Byzantine mosaics, and sitting down to dinner in a beautiful dining room of silver frames and Louis Something bureaus, I observed the Dictionnaire de La Noblesse Française. It was the last gasp of a genteel older way of life. I wandered among the high arches, spice merchants, and mote-filled light of the Aleppo souk, one of the marvels of the medieval world, remembering that line from Macbeth: “Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master o’ th’ Tiger.” I had drinks at the Baron Hotel, with its faded Pan Am stickers on the glass of the saloon doors and the ghosts of Agatha Christie, Charles Lindbergh, and T.E. Lawrence still stalking about. I diligently took notes without realizing I was recording for posterity a society that was on the verge of extinction.

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The marble-lined inner courtyard of the Great Umayyad Mosque, 2007

Manuel Vazquez

The Syrian civil war, which erupted five years after my visit, decimated that world. Georges and his wife fled to Lebanon. My guide and interpreter, bright-eyed Nedal, sent a note in 2012, saying he had escaped to Dubai to avoid being drafted into the army. “Things is very bad there,” he said of the conflict that would claim half a million lives and displace 13 million others. His brother had been arrested and was in a coma. The war cured me of romance. When I think back to my arrival in Aleppo, or the courtyard trees laden with oranges, or the high-pointed arches infused with the smell of strong tobacco, or the enticing shred of a Roman colonnade in the Damascus souk, or a breakfast of yogurt and fresh herbs in the mountains by the coast, a chiding voice starts up in my head, warning me of the dangers of fetishizing the past, for so much of what I loved about Syria is gone, irrevocably gone.

To travel romantically is, in a sense, to never leave home; it is to return with one’s assumptions intact. To travel seriously is to be remade by the experience of travel. What happened in Syria is heartbreaking, but the world is always new. To have known something incredible, and to know that it is fragile and can be lost, is not a reason to forgo travel. It is a reason to set out into the world again.

Source: Syria Before the War: Reminiscing on a Trip to Aleppo | Condé Nast Traveler