Africa & Middle East > Syrian Arab Republic > The Southern Provinces > Damascus > Articles > Going with the Flow

It was snowing at 1,350 metres, big white flocks falling on the resort of Bludan, icing the sugary villas at the head of the valley and apartment blocks down the slope. It snowed until the whole immense landscape, the heights of Syria on this side of the valley and the Lebanon Mountains on the other, was coated. Then the sun came out and filled the valley with high-altitude dazzle only a few watts short of divine light. In summer, this view of the valley and its orchards is one of the finest in Syria. Under snow it was still extraordinary, but it didn't last. Even while the couple in front of me were throwing snowballs at their three children, melting snow started flowing down the slope. I followed it to a pool fed by water from a gash in the mountainside. The pool was landscaped, tables and chairs arranged under snow-covered trees and white boats for hire to paddle across its icy surface. This was what I had come to see, the birth of the Barada River. In itself it seemed unimportant, but without the Barada there would not be a city called Damascus.

On the edge of vast Arabian sands, Damascus claims to be the world's oldest continuously inhabited city. Definitive proof of this still waits to be found beneath its unexcavated streets, but it is certainly one of the oldest: records from about 2500BC mention Damascus, or Dimashqa as it was known. For at least 4500 years its location at the crossroads of east-west and north-south trade routes made a settlement desirable. The Barada, the Abana of the Bible, made that possible. Not that the river looks much - more a spirited stream than the life force of a city. But its power is immediately apparent for above the green valley floor the mountains are as sterile as the desert beyond the city. Damascenes get the point and pay homage in their own distinct way, spreading along its banks, filling the road up the valley, crowding onto the narrow-gauge railway that hugs the river and, on summer weekends, frequenting waterside cafes, restaurants and places of pleasure - here called casinos - where the sound of water promises relief from the heat.

Driving down to Damascus, coming out of the mountains, houses and apartment blocks suddenly came into view.

“Welcome to Damascus,” my driver chanted in a way that suggested he had said it often, which was probably the case for the city is used to visitors. In fact, looked at from the high-point of history, Damascus has seen them all from Cain and Abel (the murder is said to have taken place at Zabadani, up at the end of the Barada valley railway line) to Abraham and Isaac, St. Paul and Saladin, Jean Louis Burckhardt, Lady Hester Stanhope and Sir Richard Burton, Freya Stark and Lawrence of Arabia...

Muslim tradition, never afraid of elaboration, even makes Damascus the site of the garden of Eden, a claim which the Prophet Muhammad appears to have found credible: approaching Damascus from the desert, he is said to have refused to enter the city for fear of forfeiting his right to celestial paradise by enjoying such a heavenly place on earth. And what gave life to the greenery that so seduced his eye? The Barada, of course.

I was glad to have these myths and legends fresh in my mind, for Damascus has sacrificed some of its looks to house its people. Beneath the hilltop presidential palace, low-rise concrete blocks have filled the plain, while the Barada has been so completely overwhelmed by Choukri Kouatli Street, one of the city's main thoroughfares, that I mistook it for a storm drain. A little further on, it disappeared beneath the tarmac.

The 19th-century British traveller Alexander Kinglake wrote: 'Close along on the river's edge through seven sweet miles of rustling boughs, the deepest shade, the city spreads out her whole length; as a man falls flat, face forward on the brook, that he may drink, and drink again, so Damascus, thirsting forever, lies down with her lips to the stream, and clings to its rushing waters.' Muezzin called for sunset prayers as I stood on the balcony of my hotel.

Damascus was wrapped in the grey light of dusk, the Barada was nowhere to be seen and I was wondering what the hell I was doing there. I was reminded that night when I had a drink with Nabil. Eager to show me his city, Nabil, a Damascene filmmaker with a rare sense of drama, bundled me into a taxi and headed for the old city, repeating over and over, “What can I show you? What should you see?” Beyond the citadel, we entered the old city through a break in the wall and stopped to admire elaborate entrances, medieval caravanserai, a hammam, the outline of a mosque. Then Nabil led me and, with some insistence, also the taxi driver, into an old house converted into a restaurant. The waiter wanted to seat us.

“No,” said Nabil, “we just want to look at your courtyard. Beautiful, no? That's Damascus for you.” Then we were walking along the Street Called Straight, near Bab Sharqi - the Roman city's east gate - heading for the house where St. Paul stayed after his conversion. It wasn't late, but apart from lights in a few houses the old city was eerily abandoned. Where was everyone? Nabil seemed to know, for he got us back in the taxi and out of the old city to a place called Midan (the Square), where pilgrims gathered for the haj to Mecca in the days before the Hejaz railway took the slog out of the journey. Descendants of the people who fed the pilgrims have made a name for themselves in the modern city and Midan is now known as a good place for simple food. On a street of one-dish restaurants, where chickens turned on spits and lambs were carved into shawarma, I licked my lips. Nabil had other ideas, took me to a place with a sheep's head hanging in the window and ordered the house speciality.

“What is it?” I asked nervously. “What do you call it,” he asked, “the meat of a sheep's cheek?” I told him I didn't think we had a name for it. Either way, as the guest, I was served the largest portion.

Back in the car, driving through the newer city. My spirits picked up as we put distance between ourselves and the sheep’s heads, but Nail started to complain: property prices have soared, developers are cashing in, there are too many new buildings, with so many immigrants it's getting hard to find a true Damascene. The city flashed by and I lost my bearings. Then we started to climb and I detected another shift in his mood. A few minutes later I caught a single neon-word -Casino. We were out of town, back in the Barada Valley.

“I love to come here on summer evenings,” Nabil mused. “It's so cool... I come with friends... There is music, food and the cold water. That's where the Barada gets its name. From the word barid. Cold.”

I had been hoping the Barada would lead me to the heart of the place like the Thames, the Seine or the Tiber, but now knew that to see the Barada I would have leave town. Still, Nabil's enthusiasm for the river gave me another idea: instead of impressive bridges and riverside promenades, I went back to the old city to look for the reflection of water, to listen out for its babble.

Damascus is a city where centuries rub shoulders, where a massive image of the late President Hafez al-Assad hangs above the entrance to the Ottoman Souk al-Hamidiya, beside the medieval Citadel, above a wall originally built by Roman centurions, encircling a pagan cult place. Even the corrugated tin roof over the souk's main street was a reminder of another time, peppered with bullet holes by French soldiers reluctant to leave the city in the 1940s. The sun shot arrows of light through those holes and gave a brilliance to everything from food and musical instruments to wedding gowns and fake ivory inlay. Down side streets there were other displays - bolts of fabrics, pine nuts and walnuts from Aleppo, dates from Saudi, pistachios from Iran, carpets and hand-carved chairs, metal wares, Damascene brocades, hand-blown glass... All the treasures of the Middle East there to be taken in at a glance, at once a dazzling contrast to the desert surrounding the city and an eloquent reminder of what has drawn people there over the centuries.

A day in the souk was enough to convince me that Damascus was a city of pleasures and also that many of those pleasures were as hidden as the Barada. Nothing made this clearer than the facades of houses, their windows looking into courtyards, not out onto the street, their solid doorways giving no indication of the splendours inside. These plain facades are a legacy of the Ottoman occupation, when people were threatened with taxes according to their appearance. Beyond the great wooden doors, the houses give another impression entirely. I entered one.

The Azem Palace, the home of an 18th-century governor of the city, is too grand to be representative - every mason in the city was employed in its building, columns and paving were dragged from ancient sites across Syria and the city's pools and fountains went dry while the pasha's gardens were irrigated. For all this, it is still a true Damascene house. In its tiled courtyard I found orange and lemon trees, and gently scented jasmine. In the rooms and shaded areas off the courtyard there were cushioned divans, ornately inlaid doors and panels, heavily decorated walls, coloured glass and soft lights. And when the playing children fell silent, there was the soothing babble of water falling into the central pool. Just as an Englishman likes to think of his home as his castle, so the pashas and beys of Damascus regarded their houses as oases in the city, which is itself an oasis on the edge of the desert.

It is these houses, and the life they allowed, which made - and makes - Damascus unique amongst Arab cities. Over several days, I walked through the old city and was always surprised by the contrast between the dusty poverty of the streets and the sense of space and peace in the houses. And on the way I discovered the water of the Barada filling courtyard pools, heated in the hammams, sprinkled on the streets to keep the dust down, bubbling in waterpipes at the Nofara (Fountain) cafe where an old story-teller recited a passage from one of the great Arab epics and flowing through the imaginations of the master-craftsmen who built the Ummayad mosque.

At the end of the Souk al-Hamidiya souvenir shops give way to columns from the Roman temple of Jupiter, which lead in turn to the entrance to the Ummayad Mosque. The mosque is hidden behind high walls, but the size of the stone blocks, the three towers, the stream of visitors slipping off shoes at the threshold suggest that there is something special inside. Indeed there is. The 8th-century mosque is a spectacular showplace; perhaps the world's finest Islamic building. It is a place where people come not just to pray, but to rest from the souk, talk to friends, eat lunch or to lean back and have a midday snooze against a Roman wall or a Byzantine pillar while their children play in the marble courtyard, a grand version of the Damascene courtyard with its pool and arcades. Above them, fabulous golden mosaics depict houses and gardens along a cool, shady river. Some believe this is the Barada, while others claim it as a vision of the paradise that Christians believe is lost, but which Muslims are promised is still to come.

Seeing it, I wondered whether Muslim tradition was not mistaken, whether Damascus really had been the site of the walled Garden of Eden. And if that's true then surely the city's many courtyards, with their scented, shady trees and cool running water, are a memory of it.

After such splendours I wasn't expecting to see the Barada again. But in Damascus, just when you give up on something you're likely to run into it again. I found the river flowing past one of the city's gates and traced it back to where it appeared above ground, just beneath the Citadel. From there it ran around the old city, apparently as unwanted as the refuse thrown into it, dipping beneath roads and behind houses, past ironmongers, weavers, carpenters, stone cutters and all the other small workshops on which the city depends. The Barada flowed briefly in front of the Bab Salaama - 'restored under the reign of al-Malik as-Salib Najm ed-Dine Ayyoub, 1243AD' - and beneath the bread seller shouting beside his cart, sneaked past old sabils (drinking fountains) once filled with its water, past Bab Touma with its Roman and Byzantine masonry and then on to the tomb of Sheikh Arslan. It was there that the Roman temple of Serapis stood, where Arab soldiers fell to their knees to pray before attacking Greek Damascus in 634AD. It seemed typical of the city that there was no obvious sign to remind me of its past and that the sheikh's tomb was intact, but now encircled by the flow of the city's ring road.

From the old city the slackening Barada flowed south-east through new suburbs to Haran al-Awamid - Haran of the Columns - its houses dominated by three surviving basalt columns from a Roman temple. The land was less fertile, trees less luscious, the people poorer. This was the river's last stand.

Little more than a hundred kilometres from its snow-capped source at Bludan, not so far from where it delighted Nabil, cooled throats, made trees blossom, dripped into courtyard pools, rose in steam-baths, bubbled in water-pipes, ran down gutters, inspired men to great achievements and reminded them of the Koran's promise - of a shady place beside a river where they would be waited on by willing virgins - the Barada, the 'cold' river, entered the desert and was finished off.

Articles

• More from Anthony Sattin