Visiting Syria

news.google.com

The kindness of Syrians

August 4, 2007


By Phyllis Meras - DAMASCUS, Syria -- Friends said I must not visit
Syria. What was I thinking? It was much too dangerous. The government
was too totalitarian.

Wasn't Syria suspected of playing a major role in the assassination of
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri? It bordered on Iraq and was
filled with refugees who preyed upon the unsuspecting. The U.S. State
Department was against all but essential travel. Why did I want to go
there anyway?

I replied that I had always wanted to see the walled Old City of
Damascus, renowned throughout the Middle East. I wanted to see the
"street which is called Straight," where the Bible says St. Paul
stayed in the first century.

I wanted to see the winding souks of old Aleppo, the Greco-Roman ruins
at Palmyra and the Krak des Chevaliers, the largest and best-preserved
crusader castle in the world. I didn't know it then, but I would find
out that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had decided to go to Syria
at the same time I chose.

Because I speak no Arabic and had just five days to spend in the
country, I made hotel arrangements and some travel plans in advance.
For hard-to-reach destinations, I would have a car and a driver; for
intercity travel, I would go by public bus.

My first overnight lodging was old, slightly fusty and on a busy
street. It was, however, within walking distance of the Old City and
the National and Army museums. Friends who had visited Syria had told
me that these, along with the Old City, were worth seeing.

So, the first morning, I set off. What I wanted to see, it turned out,
was all within walking distance but situated on a multilane
thoroughfare along which traffic roared without stopping.

There were no street lights and no policemen, only a pedestrian bridge
here or there over the highway. However, before I found a bridge, as I
stood, immobilized, on a traffic island, a woman took me by the arm
and helped me dodge around the cars. As she left me where I wanted to
be, she smiled. "Syrian people are kind people," she said in English.

The domed Army Museum, part of a 16th-century caravanserai built for

pilgrims on their way to Mecca, surrounds gardens where planes and
tanks are displayed, along with a sputnik - Syrians were part of the
Soviet Union's space program.

Inside the museum, visitors find glass cases of antique swords and
daggers with elegantly decorated - damascened - blades and with
handles inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There also are grim mementos of
20th-century wars against the French, who had the League of Nations
mandate to rule Syria from 1920 to 1946, and of Syria's wars against
Israel in the 1960s and '70s.

This area is also the site of a mosque and an alley of handicraft
shops selling inlaid wooden boxes, backgammon sets, Bedouin
headdresses, pottery, glass and silk. The National Museum is
particularly notable for an exhibit of the world's first known
alphabet, from the 14th-century B.C. in Ugarit on the Mediterranean
coast, and for a reconstructed A.D. second-century synagogue.

I walked from there back to the covered souks of the Old City and then
to the Omayad Mosque, one of the most important mosques remaining from
the early days of Islam.

The site once was home to a Roman temple and then a church when
Damascus became part of the Christian Byzantine Empire in the fourth
century. The church was dedicated to John the Baptist, whose head was
said to be enshrined there.

The Arabs conquered the city and made it their capital in the seventh
century, but they continued to allow Christian worship in the church.
Even after this enormous mosque was built in the eighth century, the
shrine to St. John the Baptist was kept.

Although I had removed my shoes and was wearing an ankle-length skirt
and a head scarf when I attempted to enter, I was sternly stopped and
directed to a cloaking room, where I paid to cover myself with a long
gown. In devout Islam, only the face and hands of a woman should be
seen outside the home.

In the cloaking room, a too-eager guide took me in tow. He pointed out
the green-domed structure containing the head of John the Baptist -
like Jesus, John the Baptist is a prophet in Islam.

He also showed me the tomb of Saladin, great warrior of the crusades,
and of Hussein, a son of the prophet Muhammad. Then from the courtyard
outside, I viewed the three eighth-century minarets and the green-and-
gold mosaics representing scenes of heaven that are high on the open
courtyard wall.

Later that evening, I walked the busy, narrow, shop-lined "street
which is called Straight." There, Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of
Christians, who had been blinded by God and converted outside
Damascus, regained his sight.

It was not far away, after he had angered Jews and Romans alike by
preaching of Christ and was in danger of being murdered, that Paul was
lowered from a window in a basket so he could escape. Little St.
Paul's Chapel in Bab Kisan marks this supposed spot.

On my second day, I set off with van and driver on the two-hour trip
across the desert to the Krak des Chevaliers. British adventurer and
scholar Lawrence of Arabia - Thomas Edward Lawrence - regarded this
11th-century fortification as the best crusader castle still standing
in the world.

We left Damascus on a three-lane highway. In the distance, the gold-
gray mountains that mark the border with Lebanon rose beneath the
bright blue sky. Although my 27-year-old driver, Mumad-Ahmad, spoke no
English, we managed a conversation of sorts with the aid of an Arabic-
English dictionary.

Soon the mountains became sand hills with a few cypresses and pines
and yellow flowers growing beside the road. Occasionally, we saw a
water tower or a gas station or a scattering of sand-colored cement
houses that designated a town.

The vehicles with us on the road - there were not many - were mostly
tour buses with names like Happy Travel or trucks whose loads were
covered by flapping canvas. Sometimes, at makeshift roadside shelters,
a pedestrian - a Bedouin with a flowing red-and-white-checked
headdress or a veiled woman in black - would be waiting and hoping for
a ride from a passing vehicle.

In time, the sand hills became endless desert. Often the roadside
trees had been blown almost flat by the wind. Eventually, we were
passing through the sprawling village of Al-Husn and climbing a hill
toward the Krak.

The castle is situated in a gap in the mountains that lie between
Syria's neighbors, Turkey and Lebanon. The present moated castle, with
13 outside towers and five inside, was constructed in the 12th century
by the crusaders.

Once again, an eager guide forced his services on me. As we climbed
ramps and parapets and explored dank zigzagging passageways, I learned
that 4,000 men and 400 horses had been billeted in the castle in its
heyday.

Next, we set off for Palmyra. We passed eucalyptus trees and pines and
roadside fruit sellers offering enormous oranges and strawberries.

Then we were in the desert again, with only a little scrub grass
alleviating the monotony of the sand. Here and there, we passed a
black-robed shepherd tending a few sheep. Once, where there were
shepherds' tents in the distance, Mumad-Ahmad asked if I would like to
stop to take pictures.

It soon became clear that he wanted to stop to pray. He scrambled out
of the van, went down to a stream to wash and then returned to take
his prayer rug from the dashboard, shake it out, and lay it down in
the road in front of the van for his prayers.

We reached Palmyra - the Bride of the Desert - just as the sun was
going down. The sand in the distance had turned blue in the shadow of
the pale gold mountains.. Mumad-Ahmad left me there to return to
Damascus.

The following morning, I was awakened before dawn by the call to
prayer. Then the birds began to sing. Below my hotel window, gold-pink
flat-roofed houses and a grove of palm trees came into view with the
sun.

I spent the morning climbing over Palmyra's golden ruins.

Originally a stopping place on the old Silk Road from China and India
to Europe, it is said to have existed as long ago as the 10th century
B.C. In those days, it was known as Tadmor, the City of Dates, and
indeed, as I passed small shops on my way to the ruins, shopkeepers
hurried out to wish me "Welcome" and proffer gifts of fresh dates. The
city became Palmyra, the City of Palms, after the Roman conquest in
the first and second centuries.

Since 1929, extensive excavations have been unearthing pre-Roman
temples, Roman tombs and funerary towers. I climbed over the remains
of colonnaded Roman streets and into the Roman Emperor Diocletian's
baths camp.

Outside the ruins, once again, eager locals offered to guide me or
sell me souvenirs. One, over a cup of coffee with cardamom, tried to
sell me a carpet. An entrepreneur on a motorcycle sought to tempt me
with a string of beads until he realized I was American. Then he
shouted, "George Bush, no," and sped away.

A few minutes later, he was back. "George Bush, no. America, yes," he
declared this time.

That afternoon, I took the public bus to Aleppo. Getting it, however,
was a bit iffy. In the bus terminals, prospective passengers cluster
around a table buying tickets. Tickets are sold only after the bus has
arrived and only if there is space on it after some have disembarked.
To buy a ticket, one must provide a passport or some other identity
paper.

An English-speaking worker with a Croatian oil company helped me buy
my ticket for the first leg of the journey and, when I had to change
buses, put me on the right one again.

On buses - because so much of the travel is through hot desert - a
porter fills and refills plastic cups with water at each seat. Seats
are numbered, and one must beware of sitting in the wrong one because
seats are so scarce. There is television entertainment.

In 18th-century B.C. Aleppo, which claims to be the oldest
continuously inhabited city in the world, I visited miles of covered
souks and bought the yellow-green olive-oil soap for which it is
famous and a Kurdish rug. I passed butcher stalls of hanging
carcasses, nut and fruit stores overflowing with almonds and
pistachios and figs and dates.

I visited the Great Mosque where Zachariah, the father of John the
Baptist, is said to be buried, and the 12th-century Citadel that rises
at the edge of the Old City and was built to keep the crusaders out of
northern Syria.

At the Citadel, I met two young university students. One was in
bluejeans but with her hair under a hijab, or scarf; the other wore a
knee-length dress, and her hair flowed loosely. We began to talk, and
soon they invited me across the city to see their very modern
university and their dorm.

From Aleppo, I went with a car and driver to see the pillar on which
St. Simeon Stylites, to keep his admirers from touching him, had lived
and preached in the fifth century. There, on pine-covered hills, are
the picturesque ruins of the once monumental Romanesque church that
honored him.

It was Friday, a holiday, and the wildflower-covered site was filled
with families and schoolchildren. A group of teenagers, easily
recognizing me as a foreigner, soon were exclaiming, "Welcome. What is
your name? How are you?"

One was offering a gift of a cone of bright red ice. Another, learning
I was an American, handed me a bouquet of poppies he had plucked.

A third gave me a key chain. On the front, I could see that there was
writing in Arabic, but it was not until I was in the car returning to
Aleppo that I turned it over and saw that it said, in English, "I love
you."

As the Damascus woman had said, the Syrians I had met on my visit had
been kind indeed.

···

The United States has sanctions against Syria, so there are no direct
flights between the two countries. International carriers fly from
Washington to Damascus with a change of planes at their European hubs.
Cypriot Airlines flies from Lanarca, Cyprus, and Syrian Air from
London and other European capitals.

A visa, costing $100, is required from the Syrian Embassy, 2215
Wyoming Ave. NW.

"Mike"
The kindness of Syrians

Is Syria in Europe?

nothing else to do ??

"Mike" a écrit dans le message de
ps.com...
news.google.com

The kindness of Syrians

August 4, 2007


By Phyllis Meras - DAMASCUS, Syria -- Friends said I must not visit
Syria. What was I thinking? It was much too dangerous. The government
was too totalitarian.

Wasn't Syria suspected of playing a major role in the assassination of
Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri? It bordered on Iraq and was
filled with refugees who preyed upon the unsuspecting. The U.S. State
Department was against all but essential travel. Why did I want to go
there anyway?

I replied that I had always wanted to see the walled Old City of
Damascus, renowned throughout the Middle East. I wanted to see the
"street which is called Straight," where the Bible says St. Paul
stayed in the first century.

I wanted to see the winding souks of old Aleppo, the Greco-Roman ruins
at Palmyra and the Krak des Chevaliers, the largest and best-preserved
crusader castle in the world. I didn't know it then, but I would find
out that Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi had decided to go to Syria
at the same time I chose.

Because I speak no Arabic and had just five days to spend in the
country, I made hotel arrangements and some travel plans in advance.
For hard-to-reach destinations, I would have a car and a driver; for
intercity travel, I would go by public bus.

My first overnight lodging was old, slightly fusty and on a busy
street. It was, however, within walking distance of the Old City and
the National and Army museums. Friends who had visited Syria had told
me that these, along with the Old City, were worth seeing.

So, the first morning, I set off. What I wanted to see, it turned out,
was all within walking distance but situated on a multilane
thoroughfare along which traffic roared without stopping.

There were no street lights and no policemen, only a pedestrian bridge
here or there over the highway. However, before I found a bridge, as I
stood, immobilized, on a traffic island, a woman took me by the arm
and helped me dodge around the cars. As she left me where I wanted to
be, she smiled. "Syrian people are kind people," she said in English.

The domed Army Museum, part of a 16th-century caravanserai built for

pilgrims on their way to Mecca, surrounds gardens where planes and
tanks are displayed, along with a sputnik - Syrians were part of the
Soviet Union's space program.

Inside the museum, visitors find glass cases of antique swords and
daggers with elegantly decorated - damascened - blades and with
handles inlaid with mother-of-pearl. There also are grim mementos of
20th-century wars against the French, who had the League of Nations
mandate to rule Syria from 1920 to 1946, and of Syria's wars against
Israel in the 1960s and '70s.

This area is also the site of a mosque and an alley of handicraft
shops selling inlaid wooden boxes, backgammon sets, Bedouin
headdresses, pottery, glass and silk. The National Museum is
particularly notable for an exhibit of the world's first known
alphabet, from the 14th-century B.C. in Ugarit on the Mediterranean
coast, and for a reconstructed A.D. second-century synagogue.

I walked from there back to the covered souks of the Old City and then
to the Omayad Mosque, one of the most important mosques remaining from
the early days of Islam.

The site once was home to a Roman temple and then a church when
Damascus became part of the Christian Byzantine Empire in the fourth
century. The church was dedicated to John the Baptist, whose head was
said to be enshrined there.

The Arabs conquered the city and made it their capital in the seventh
century, but they continued to allow Christian worship in the church.
Even after this enormous mosque was built in the eighth century, the
shrine to St. John the Baptist was kept.

Although I had removed my shoes and was wearing an ankle-length skirt
and a head scarf when I attempted to enter, I was sternly stopped and
directed to a cloaking room, where I paid to cover myself with a long
gown. In devout Islam, only the face and hands of a woman should be
seen outside the home.

In the cloaking room, a too-eager guide took me in tow. He pointed out
the green-domed structure containing the head of John the Baptist -
like Jesus, John the Baptist is a prophet in Islam.

He also showed me the tomb of Saladin, great warrior of the crusades,
and of Hussein, a son of the prophet Muhammad. Then from the courtyard
outside, I viewed the three eighth-century minarets and the green-and-
gold mosaics representing scenes of heaven that are high on the open
courtyard wall.

Later that evening, I walked the busy, narrow, shop-lined "street
which is called Straight." There, Saul of Tarsus, the persecutor of
Christians, who had been blinded by God and converted outside
Damascus, regained his sight.

It was not far away, after he had angered Jews and Romans alike by
preaching of Christ and was in danger of being murdered, that Paul was
lowered from a window in a basket so he could escape. Little St.
Paul's Chapel in Bab Kisan marks this supposed spot.

On my second day, I set off with van and driver on the two-hour trip
across the desert to the Krak des Chevaliers. British adventurer and
scholar Lawrence of Arabia - Thomas Edward Lawrence - regarded this
11th-century fortification as the best crusader castle still standing
in the world.

We left Damascus on a three-lane highway. In the distance, the gold-
gray mountains that mark the border with Lebanon rose beneath the
bright blue sky. Although my 27-year-old driver, Mumad-Ahmad, spoke no
English, we managed a conversation of sorts with the aid of an Arabic-
English dictionary.

Soon the mountains became sand hills with a few cypresses and pines
and yellow flowers growing beside the road. Occasionally, we saw a
water tower or a gas station or a scattering of sand-colored cement
houses that designated a town.

The vehicles with us on the road - there were not many - were mostly
tour buses with names like Happy Travel or trucks whose loads were
covered by flapping canvas. Sometimes, at makeshift roadside shelters,
a pedestrian - a Bedouin with a flowing red-and-white-checked
headdress or a veiled woman in black - would be waiting and hoping for
a ride from a passing vehicle.

In time, the sand hills became endless desert. Often the roadside
trees had been blown almost flat by the wind. Eventually, we were
passing through the sprawling village of Al-Husn and climbing a hill
toward the Krak.

The castle is situated in a gap in the mountains that lie between
Syria's neighbors, Turkey and Lebanon. The present moated castle, with
13 outside towers and five inside, was constructed in the 12th century
by the crusaders.

Once again, an eager guide forced his services on me. As we climbed
ramps and parapets and explored dank zigzagging passageways, I learned
that 4,000 men and 400 horses had been billeted in the castle in its
heyday.

Next, we set off for Palmyra. We passed eucalyptus trees and pines and
roadside fruit sellers offering enormous oranges and strawberries.

Then we were in the desert again, with only a little scrub grass
alleviating the monotony of the sand. Here and there, we passed a
black-robed shepherd tending a few sheep. Once, where there were
shepherds' tents in the distance, Mumad-Ahmad asked if I would like to
stop to take pictures.

It soon became clear that he wanted to stop to pray. He scrambled out
of the van, went down to a stream to wash and then returned to take
his prayer rug from the dashboard, shake it out, and lay it down in
the road in front of the van for his prayers.

We reached Palmyra - the Bride of the Desert - just as the sun was
going down. The sand in the distance had turned blue in the shadow of
the pale gold mountains.. Mumad-Ahmad left me there to return to
Damascus.

The following morning, I was awakened before dawn by the call to
prayer. Then the birds began to sing. Below my hotel window, gold-pink
flat-roofed houses and a grove of palm trees came into view with the
sun.

I spent the morning climbing over Palmyra's golden ruins.

Originally a stopping place on the old Silk Road from China and India
to Europe, it is said to have existed as long ago as the 10th century
B.C. In those days, it was known as Tadmor, the City of Dates, and
indeed, as I passed small shops on my way to the ruins, shopkeepers
hurried out to wish me "Welcome" and proffer gifts of fresh dates. The
city became Palmyra, the City of Palms, after the Roman conquest in
the first and second centuries.

Since 1929, extensive excavations have been unearthing pre-Roman
temples, Roman tombs and funerary towers. I climbed over the remains
of colonnaded Roman streets and into the Roman Emperor Diocletian's
baths camp.

Outside the ruins, once again, eager locals offered to guide me or
sell me souvenirs. One, over a cup of coffee with cardamom, tried to
sell me a carpet. An entrepreneur on a motorcycle sought to tempt me
with a string of beads until he realized I was American. Then he
shouted, "George Bush, no," and sped away.

A few minutes later, he was back. "George Bush, no. America, yes," he
declared this time.

That afternoon, I took the public bus to Aleppo. Getting it, however,
was a bit iffy. In the bus terminals, prospective passengers cluster
around a table buying tickets. Tickets are sold only after the bus has
arrived and only if there is space on it after some have disembarked.
To buy a ticket, one must provide a passport or some other identity
paper.

An English-speaking worker with a Croatian oil company helped me buy
my ticket for the first leg of the journey and, when I had to change
buses, put me on the right one again.

On buses - because so much of the travel is through hot desert - a
porter fills and refills plastic cups with water at each seat. Seats
are numbered, and one must beware of sitting in the wrong one because
seats are so scarce. There is television entertainment.

In 18th-century B.C. Aleppo, which claims to be the oldest
continuously inhabited city in the world, I visited miles of covered
souks and bought the yellow-green olive-oil soap for which it is
famous and a Kurdish rug. I passed butcher stalls of hanging
carcasses, nut and fruit stores overflowing with almonds and
pistachios and figs and dates.

I visited the Great Mosque where Zachariah, the father of John the
Baptist, is said to be buried, and the 12th-century Citadel that rises
at the edge of the Old City and was built to keep the crusaders out of
northern Syria.

At the Citadel, I met two young university students. One was in
bluejeans but with her hair under a hijab, or scarf; the other wore a
knee-length dress, and her hair flowed loosely. We began to talk, and
soon they invited me across the city to see their very modern
university and their dorm.

From Aleppo, I went with a car and driver to see the pillar on which
St. Simeon Stylites, to keep his admirers from touching him, had lived
and preached in the fifth century. There, on pine-covered hills, are
the picturesque ruins of the once monumental Romanesque church that
honored him.

It was Friday, a holiday, and the wildflower-covered site was filled
with families and schoolchildren. A group of teenagers, easily
recognizing me as a foreigner, soon were exclaiming, "Welcome. What is
your name? How are you?"

One was offering a gift of a cone of bright red ice. Another, learning
I was an American, handed me a bouquet of poppies he had plucked.

A third gave me a key chain. On the front, I could see that there was
writing in Arabic, but it was not until I was in the car returning to
Aleppo that I turned it over and saw that it said, in English, "I love
you."

As the Damascus woman had said, the Syrians I had met on my visit had
been kind indeed.

···

The United States has sanctions against Syria, so there are no direct
flights between the two countries. International carriers fly from
Washington to Damascus with a change of planes at their European hubs.
Cypriot Airlines flies from Lanarca, Cyprus, and Syrian Air from
London and other European capitals.

A visa, costing $100, is required from the Syrian Embassy, 2215
Wyoming Ave. NW.