From Souk to Souk

by Robin Ratchford

  ***

  The next day, as the anonymous door of the hotel clicked shut behind me, I felt like I had fallen out of the wardrobe, leaving Narnia behind. Once again, I was in the run-down reality of central Damascus. Only the bright morning sunlight offered any consolation. I followed my instinct and the rather vague map in my guidebook. After a few turns, I found myself in a broad street where vegetable shops, food stores, tiny travel agencies and old houses were lined up one after the other in a jumble of dangerously dilapidated buildings. At the stand nearest to me, a sturdy woman in a brown abaya – the traditional loose over-garment worn by women – was unenthusiastically examining the greengroceries: potatoes, root vegetables, courgettes, aubergines and piles of herbs, the last wilting, exhausted. It was not a promising start and yet, according to my map, I was only a stone’s throw away from one of the main roads of the Old City. As I passed a barber’s shop, a whiff of cheap lemon scent drifted out to greet me. From a slightly fading poster in the window, President Assad looked benevolently over the thin towels hanging on a rickety clothes horse on the street in front. A small boy in oversized Crocs and dusty trousers was trying to catch an emaciated kitten, but, skulking nervously below the towels, it kept skipping out of reach every time he got near. In the tiny, brightly lit shop, the grey-haired owner sat reading a newspaper, ignoring the antics outside.

  The map proved correct and a few minutes later I found myself on Straight Street and in a distinctly smarter and much renovated environment. The ancient thoroughfare was true to its name and extended into the distance in both directions. Originally laid out by the Greeks and later colonnaded by the Romans for whom it was the Decumanus Maximus, it is still the main east-west axis through the old walled city. Today, however, there were no marching legions on what is now known in Arabic as the Share’a Bab Sharqi: in fact, it was surprisingly quiet, perhaps because it was still quite early. I headed towards the centre of the old town, its souks and the famous Umayyad mosque. With cars parked along much of its length, the paved one-way street was only wide enough for single-lane traffic. The bay windows of the smart two-storey buildings could easily have been in Spain, while stylish wooden shutters were fastened back on both sides of the open shop fronts exposing an eclectic range of goods. Spangly T-shirts and designer jeans in one store contrasted with traditional Arab dress in the next, and bilious sweets in a tiny outlet presented a kaleidoscope of colour compared to the monochrome display of tin pans just a few paces away.

  ‘Come here, my friend!’ called a slim young man from one of several little shops selling dried fruits and nuts. He waved a tanned arm at me and flashed a broad grin. ‘Come and try!’

  ‘Thank you,’ I smiled back, shaking my head.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I heard him call. Perhaps rather unsociably, I did not answer and instead just threw him another smile.

  A few minutes later, the street widened out, but was filled with even more parked cars, the latest models of Mercedes standing next to dented Peugeots from a bygone age, shining black metal alongside dust-covered burgundy paintwork. Just beyond the makeshift car park, a crooked house, its two first-floor windows startled eyes, looked as if it was about to collapse. Only the network of cables linking it to its neighbours seemed to hold it in place.

  A little further on was the entrance to the Medhat Pasha Souk covering the western end of Straight Street, the shade provided by its high, arched roof a welcome relief. Beams of light dropped in from the small windows along its length, while the numerous holes that pockmarked it shone like tiny stars. A confusing mix of smells danced around me: out of sacks of tea and coffee in one store rose rich and spicy aromas, while the fragrance of lavender, honey and jasmine floated across from neatly stacked little bricks of traditional soap in another. As I sauntered past, I let my eyes wander from shop to shop, from road to roof, from one passer-by to the next.

  About halfway through the souk, sunlight flooded in through a gap in the long wall where a street led off, specks of dust floating gently in the haze before me. I turned the opposite direction into the spice souk, its shadowy world lit only by thin shafts of light from little windows high above. The air was buzzing with chatter and market traders’ cries and suffused with a cocktail of aromas, the sweet scents of patchouli and sandalwood swirling past the pungent odour of sweat. Trying not to bump into the piles of boxes of mysterious foodstuffs stacked in the middle, I watched the people of Damascus go about their business: scrawny men pushing laden handcarts, stout women in black abayas, young ladies in tight jeans and colourful headscarves, lean children in Western clothes, and, among them all, the occasional, self-conscious, sandal-wearing French tourist. Sensing that my curiosity was perhaps verging on the rude, I diverted my eyes to the colourful array of goods piled high in the small shops on each side of the souk: neat rows of boxes, jars, bottles and packets with unintelligible labels lined the shelves while, outside, carefully crafted pyramids of spices in earthy colours rose from large square tins. They looked like the powder paints we used to have at school, but the evocative scents of cinnamon, cardamom and cloves brought incongruous thoughts of Christmas cakes and Glühwein, an association reinforced by the ubiquitous cardboard boxes of dates and strings of dried figs. In another shop, a panoply of yarns added to the unusual mixture of goods, the vivid skeins arranged according to colour. A little further on, looking at the delicate domes of dried lavender, saffron and miniature roses that crowned bulging white sacks, I wondered if they really filled the entire bag or just the last quarter, sitting on a sea of polystyrene peanuts or some other more mundane and less expensive material. Gently, I picked up a handful of dried roses, the tiny flowers weighing next to nothing and still fragrant. I suddenly recalled having tried as a young child to make perfume from rose petals in jam jars filled with water: an early and unsuccessful attempt to go into business, the brownish liquid soon smelling only of rotting flowers. And, at that moment, a flurry of other childhood memories came flooding back, here in a world utterly alien to the one in which they were formed.

  ‘Make very nice gift!’ said the storekeeper, emerging from his small shop and unknowingly chasing away the ghosts of my past. A carefully trimmed moustache rested on a face that had spent many years in the sun, but his close-set eyes still had a youthful glint to them. ‘How much would you like?’ Before I had time to think, he produced a brown paper bag and, taking a small aluminium scoop, began filling it.

  ‘How much is it?’

  ‘Is not expensive, my friend,’ he smiled, exposing more gaps than teeth. The bag was already brimming with roses. He folded it closed and Sellotaped the flap. ‘Four hundred,’ he said, holding out the package.

  A fait accompli, but a fair price, I thought, handing over my crumpled Syrian pounds. I knew they would make an ideal gift as pot-pourri for a friend, even if in Syria they are often used for culinary purposes. As I returned my wallet to my trouser pocket, instinct made its presence felt and whispered to me that I was being watched. I looked up to see a clean-shaven man in jeans and a navy polo top standing in front of a shop a short distance away, dark eyes observing me. He was partially silhouetted against the daylight at the entrance of the souk, but I felt he had a familiar air. He turned and, picking up something from the display of goods, began talking to the bearded shopkeeper approaching him. I tried to remember if I had seen him elsewhere since arriving in the country: terrible at recalling names, I rarely forget a face, yet I could not bring to mind why this one appeared so familiar.

  Continuing in the direction of the Great Mosque that lay just beyond the souk, I paused to look at the items on show outside a couple of traditional pharmacies. Many would not have looked out of place in a Chinese medicine shop: fox pelts and snake skins, dried puffer fish and rabbits’ feet dangled above pumice stones and loofahs. I tried to convince myself that some of the more exotic articles were only for decoration and not evidence of a thriving trade in rare animal parts. At a flapping of wings I looked up to see a couple of
pigeons vying for space on the sills of one of the windows that ran along the first floor of the long buildings either side of the souk. The rooms behind the dusty panes seemed abandoned and lifeless: the centre of this ancient city was at once busy and bustling, yet so many of the buildings were run-down and empty.

  Just beyond the end of the spice souk was the outer wall of the famous eighth-century Great Mosque, built when Damascus was the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, at the time the largest empire the world had seen, stretching all the way from Portugal to Transoxiana in Central Asia. At the centre of the Old City, it is a powerful symbol of the layers of human history here and the importance of Damascus over the last four thousand years. Today, Syria’s pivotal position in the Middle East makes its capital once more a focus of attention, sadly for all the wrong reasons, but it no longer enjoys the commercial or cultural status it once did. I turned and followed the crowd along the lane, the high wall of the mosque towering above me like the bulwark of some forbidden palace. The street soon opened out into a large space in front of the main entrance of the mosque where sellers of Korans, sweets and souvenirs mingled with shoppers, tourists and police. I stopped to look at the Great Mosque, its solid wall of light beige stone contrasting with the peaceful azure sky above. Here, in front of me, stood the fourth-holiest place in Islam, built on top of a Christian basilica reputed to have housed the head of John the Baptist, the relic now having its own shrine within the mosque. The basilica was itself constructed over the largest Roman temple in Syria, dedicated to the god of thunder, Jupiter. This, in turn, had been erected on the site of a temple devoted to the Aramaean cult god of thunderstorms and rain, Hadad, referred to in the Bible as Rimmon. It was the Aramaeans who, entering the city in the eleventh century BC, first made Dimashqu, as they called it, into an important trading centre. And it was their language, Aramaic, that Jesus spoke.

  I walked over to the ticket office at the side of the mosque, a few paces from where the tomb of Saladin stood. Nemesis of the Crusaders whom he drove from the Holy Land in the twelfth century, the man had been laid to rest in the city where he had died. I bought a ticket and then walked over to the mosque entrance specially reserved for tourists, where, having taken off my shoes and placed them on the racks with all the others, I entered the main courtyard. It felt strange walking across the smooth floor, my stockinged feet making no sound on the polished limestone, uneven with age. A couple of small groups of Westerners, the women looking rather like monks in the grey, hooded cloaks provided by the mosque authorities, listened to their guides slowly and deliberately explaining the history and features of the elegant building. A few locals wandered around, some taking photographs, others sitting on the warm floor and engaging in small-talk or simply relaxing in the sunshine. The clean lines of the arches and the plain roof somehow managed to blend perfectly with the more ornate architectural elements – Corinthian columns, ceramic tiling and beautiful eighth-century mosaics. The vast courtyard with its long arcades was a haven of calm compared to the bustle of the city outside. In the main prayer hall, I stopped to look at the elaborate marble shrine said to contain the head once delivered on a plate to Salome, the reliquary’s green dome giving it the aspect of a gaudy miniature cathedral.

  Like so many places in the region, in Damascus historic facts are interwoven with tales born of belief. As I strolled around the mosque, I reflected on how John the Baptist probably did exist, but no-one knew if the head alleged to be in the shrine was really his. According to the New Testament, the saints Paul and Thomas both lived in this city. Paul, formerly Saul of Tarsus, was a Pharisee who zealously persecuted Christians. It was on the road from Jerusalem to Damascus that Jesus is said to have appeared to him in a blinding vision. The New Testament was written in Koine Greek, a dialect then the lingua franca of much of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The vagaries of Koine vocabulary and grammar mean the description of what happened to Saul that day is open to interpretation when translated: it is not clear if he heard a voice or just a sound, or whether his travelling companions could not hear what he heard or simply could not understand it. The implications for what Saul actually experienced are intriguing: did he really have an encounter with the resurrected Christ, or did he merely suffer from sunstroke or a seizure, the latter causing his temporary blindness? It was not until three days later that Ananias, a disciple of Jesus living in Damascus and following instructions supposedly received from his Lord in a vision, found Saul in a house on the ‘Street called Straight’ and apparently cured him of his blindness. Once healed, however, Saul saw the light, as it were, converted to Christianity and became the Apostle Paul. One may question the origin or authenticity of Paul’s experience, but that he existed as a person does not seem to be in doubt. The city’s Jews were angered by his Damascene conversion and he was forced to make a hasty escape in a basket lowered from a window in the city wall. Yet, before taking flight, Paul would have walked along Straight Street, just as I had done earlier that day. Fellow saint, Thomas, even gave his name to one of the city gates and a Christian neighbourhood of old Damascus, Bab Tuma. As I stood in the mosque contemplating the fluid border between fact and belief, I considered how the finer points of linguistics could affect both and, with them, history.

  Back outside in the cobbled plaza in front of the mosque, looking at the people, residents of this ancient city as well as visitors, milling around and going about their business, it was strange to think that the scene before me was probably not so different from the one that would have been played out here time and time again over the centuries. In the time of Paul and Thomas, the Temple of Jupiter would have been the main place of Roman worship. Today, the impressive ruins of its western gate with its high arches and the remaining corner of the pediment supported by three towering columns stand between the Great Mosque and the entrance of the Al-Hamidiyah Souk, a reminder of the ephemeral nature of even the greatest empires.

  Turning to go into the bazaar, I caught my breath as I thought I recognised the man from the spice souk. A moment later, the figure had melted into the crowd. I wondered if I really was being followed, or if it was just my subconscious playing tricks on me. Certainly, there was no reason for me to arouse anyone’s suspicion. Slowly making my way up the broad paved steps towards the souk, I could feel my pulse quickening. I paused at one of the stands selling Korans and, as casually as I could, looked back towards the mosque, half expecting to see cold, dark eyes staring at me, but instead there was just a melee of shoppers and a couple of pale, silver-haired tourists studying an open guide book. Even so, a feeling of unease had begun to ferment in my stomach.

  Continuing into the souk, I was surprised to find myself in a seemingly endless nineteenth-century arcade which, with its two-storey colonnaded walls, rows of rectangular windows and arched cast-iron roof, would not have looked out of place in Europe. Like the other souks, rays of daylight fell through windows in the roof high above. The structure itself could have been in Paris, but the brightly lit shops were filled with an assortment of traditional Arab wear ranging from the ubiquitous sombre black abayas to glitzy sequined dresses in the gaudiest of colours that could have been lifted from a bad operetta about Marie-Antoinette. Yet it was the number of shop windows openly displaying skimpy and erotic women’s underwear that was surprising: Damascus, it seemed, was the lingerie capital of the Middle East.

  ‘You want water, mister?’

  I turned to see a young boy in an embroidered waistcoat, baggy trousers and a scarlet fez that had seen better days. On his back hung a large brass samovar almost as big as he was. With rough fingers, he pulled a plastic cup from a stack that was attached to his belt, along with a row of little brass tumblers.

  ‘You want water?’ he repeated. A moustache was trying hard to form above his open lips. He looked at me hopefully with grey eyes, but I think he saw the answer already in mine. I sensed that he asked again, this time silently, but the most I was willing to give was a smile. He drifted away, h
is dishevelled black slippers making no noise on the paving stones.

  A little further on, I saw a small crowd gathered outside a wooden-fronted shop selling ice cream. I strained my neck to watch as the staff, in white T-shirts and side caps and wearing surgical gloves, pushed handfuls of the sticky, elastic mixture into cornets. They then rolled them in chopped pistachio nuts before handing them to the waiting clients, who began eagerly devouring their oversized ices. In the background, as if engaged in some tribal ritual, a row of men was rhythmically thrusting long wooden pestles into open-topped churns set into the counter and filled with the coveted white mixture. The clack-clack noise of wood on metal sounded like strange experimental music. Above the door, the sign indicated it was the Bakdash ice cream parlour, famous for its Booza, a frozen dessert made by pounding a mixture of mastic and sahlab, a flour made from orchid tubers. When my turn came, I pointed to the stack of cornets and moments later took possession of a weighty delight, handed to me by a man with a pointed nose and painter’s-brush moustache.

  I moved away from the crowd pressing at the counter and looked around at the shoppers, some sauntering, others rushing. Then, a short distance away, I spotted him trying to attract the attention of passers-by. Feeling like a salmon swimming upstream, I made my way through the throng of people, protectively clutching the ice cream close to my chest. When I reached the young water seller, I held out the short cornet with its nut-covered snowball. He looked surprised and reached for a plastic goblet.