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Monday, November 29, 2010

The Road from Damascus, Part 2 - Good Krak

 The principal reason for our recent visit to Syria was for me to finally achieve my ambition of visiting Krak des Chevaliers, the greatest crusader castle and reputedly the inspiration for the design of Edward I's concentric castles in North Wales. Lawrence of Arabia, another Jesus College alumnus, called it 'perhaps the best preserved and wholly admirable castle in the world', and Krak certainly didn't disappoint. The photos I'd seen had led me to expect a fortress upon a bluff in the middle of a level desert; in fact, it stands on a dizzying hill top, dominating the only route through the mountains from the Syrian heartland to the sea. The scale of the citadel is simply breathtaking, but then, it needed to be huge: in its heyday in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Krak des Chevaliers was the headquarters of some two thousand Knights Hospitaller and their attendant footsoldiers, who needed a literally cavernous living space, the Hall of the Knights (complete with a long row of cosily sociable latrines), vast stables for the four hundred or so horses, and the largest oven I've ever seen in any of the many hundreds of castles that I've visited. But there were delicate touches too, notably the stunning Gothic loggia and the lovely chapel - the latter was converted into a mosque after Krak fell to the Mamluks in 1271, having previously resisted sieges by both Nur ad-Din and Saladin (whose tomb we visited in Damascus).

One of the best or worst things about Krak, depending on one's point of view, is the complete absence of 'elf 'n' safety' (indeed, Syria as a whole is a land where the entire brigade of H&S jobsworths should be sent en masse to suffer a communal nervous breakdown). Vast holes in the ground are completely unfenced; uneven, unlit surfaces abound; the wall walk, with dizzying drops on both sides, has no parapets, so vertigo sufferers should stay well clear of the edges. The castle has apparently banned school parties but seems perfectly content to allow families and adults of varying degrees of responsibility to do what they please. But then, this is small beer in a country where the driving makes Cairo look like a haven of careful motorists and crossing the road is literally a life-and-death experience: maybe this is partly a consequence of the confusion inherent in road signs like the one I spotted near Damascus, 'Make light speed - place full of inhabitants'.




Pictures, from top: the inner curtain wall and moat; left, the Mamluk baths (aka an unfenced hole); right, the Gothic loggia; the chapel/mosque; the Hall of the Knights; the view from the parapets.

Sunday, November 21, 2010

The Road from Damascus, Part 1

Back in the UK after a fortnight in the Middle East, the highlight of which was a short stay in Syria. We'd gone primarily so I could finally achieve the lifelong ambition of visiting Krak des Chevaliers, the greatest of the Crusader castles (the subject of 'Part 2' in a day or two), but the country as a whole proved to be a real eye-opener on so many levels. The glib but damning designations of the Bush/Blair era - 'rogue state' and so forth - do an injustice to a country that in social and religious terms is remarkably liberal for the region, with mosques and churches of various Christian hues co-existing happily almost side-by-side (just as what are virtually pubs stand just a little way from the souks). The people that we met were uniformly friendly, deeply committed to family life and often possessing decent English - Syria, once part of the French empire, is a classic example of the inexorable decline of French as a global language, with some of the old 'boites postales' surviving alongside Hellenic and Roman ruins as forlorn reminders of lost ages. As for the history and culture...where to begin? The National Museum of Damascus has on display the world's first alphabet, inscribed on a tiny tablet from the coastal city of Ugarit, next to the world's first musical notation. At, say, the British Museum, these would probably have a room to themselves, with spectacular lighting, a vast explanatory display and visitors queueing round the block to see them; yet in Damascus, one almost stumbles upon them in the corner of a room full of other exhibits. There were many other such discoveries in Damascus, in Aleppo and in Palmyra (the subject of 'Part 3').




But some of the most memorable moments were the unscripted ones: the visit to the 'Bagdad Cafe', the idiosyncratic 'service station' on the road from Palmyra to Damascus which resembles a cross between a Bedouin stopover, a lowbrow gift shop and a beer garden (without the beer); and the unscheduled call at our guide's home town of Homs, which enabled us to eat at the splendid Julia Dumna restaurant (on the site of the home of the Syrian wife of the Roman emperor Septimus Severus) before visiting the atmospheric Um al-Zunnar church, aka the Cathedral of the Virgin Mary, one of the oldest churches in the world and the repository of what is claimed to be Mary's belt. Such wonderful hidden treasures seem almost to be around virtually every corner in Syria, and it's tragic that a mixture of politics, an overly-bureaucratic visa system (the latter a consequence of the former - Irish citizens get in more easily) and inadequate marketing prevent their getting the tourist trade from the west that they undoubtedly deserve to have.

Having said all that, it was still a bit disconcerting to pass road signs which placed us no more than an hour and a half's drive from the Iraq border...  


(Pictures, from top: the least upright of Damascus's many ramshackle houses; left, the interior of the great Umayyad mosque of Damascus; right, the church of the Virgin Mary at Homs; and a crossroads at which a good sense of direction is arguably essential)