SYRIA: Damascus, Seidnaya, Maulula, Sayyida Zeyneb

DAMASCUS

There's no better way to perk up after a red eye than an arrival in a completly new country. In the Damascus airport I was whisked through customs by a friendly official, picked up by two guys with gentle Damascene accents and driven through dense cinderblock neighborhoods where mothers tended to children playing in small roadside parks. Everyone was as wide awake as I was and no one seemed to notice that it was 3am. This arrival was a reminder to cas asside preconceptions of the region, which I tried hard to do. Nonetheless I still found my overactive imagination worrying that cars were going to suddenly explode in the street. I guess I shouldn't have watched The Kingdom and Syriana three times.
One of the many Christian shrines near my hostel

Damascus by day was pretty sweet. The Old City, roughly a square mile, is a chaotic maze of houses and shops that haven't changed too much since Alladin's time, except for the occasional car wiggling its way through the alleys and the confused net of electrical wires strung under the crooked shutters. Under normal circumstances I have a decent sense of direction and my Lonely Planets don't fail me, but in the Old City I found myself lost half the day. I bumped around like a lab rat in a labrynth until I had seen practically every minaret, private shrine to the Virgin Mary, ice cream stand, wedding dress shop, tombstone carver, ancient gate, nut confectionary, falafel booth, cloistered mosque and covered souq in the Old City. The highlight was the stately 8th Century Ummayad Mosque built over a Roman temple and Byzantine basillica, well before anyone had any ideas as to what Islamic architecture would eventually look like. The huge courtyard was packed with worshippers from all over the Near East, many bused in from Iran to pray and weep at various Shiite shrines in the city.

Shoe shop

The main part of the covered souk (market)


Popular icecream shop Water seller
Souk
Ummayad Mosque

Inside the Ummayad Mosque

Pastry shop


The newer district outside the old walls


New friends at the schwarma shop

In the basement of the National Museum



Headstone carvers


Headstones, including one for the Hezbollah martyr in the family


Restaurant in a typical Damascene house

Poster shop selling posters of a) The three Shia martyrs b) Nasrallah c) Ayatollah Khomeini d) Assad (obviously) e) Arab pop stars f) Female pinups

The fetid latrine that is the Barada River

Possibly the worst beer in Eurasia: Barada, named after the river shown above

Shrine of Hussein in central Damascus

At the shrine of Hussein. The first person to spot the infidel wins $5.

Damascus by night from the heights of Mt. Qassion

And every last bit of it, from the crumbling alleys to the windows of the taxis was covered with portraits of the Assads, the deceased Haffez looking like a dignified Republican congressman, next to Bashar, his beady-eyed son who seems more like the neighborhood peadophile than a ruthless Baathist dictator. His posters proclaim, "I believe in Syria," but it's hard to know if Syrians believe in him. Do the taxi drivers plus my Palestinian Christian hostel owner post picutres of Assad out of fear or admiration. We can probably guess, although I've heard that the terrible anarchy in neighboring Iraq has made Syrians more sympathetic to their dynastic strongman, who lives in a severe concrete fortress/palace overlooking the city.
Assad at the Hijaz train station, built in 1917 to transport Syrians to Mecca.


The "Badass aviator Assad" sticker which is found on many taxi windows

"I believe in Syria"

SEIDNAYA and MAULULA
The following day, while Cole took a crushingly hard Arabic final, I took a day trip north of the city to the Marionite shrine cities of Seidnaya and Maulula. Each picturesque town was set into a mammoth strip of sandstone that would have fit into Lawrence of Arabia or any John Wayn movie. Each town had a handful of monestaries built to Saint So-and-So, monestaries that had attracted pilgrims since ancient times but had since been rebilt in the last century and carefully maintained in the current one. I watched black-robed priests baptize a less-than-amused toddler and hordes of Arab Christians pray in the musty shrines. At the Seidnaya monestary, a few groups of Muslims, looking out of place with their covered heads, came in to pay respects to the saint in question, who was apparently sacred to them too. I was the dust and weat of the day in a Damascus hammam where I was directed to scrub myself with a fistful of hay. Good stuff.

Monastery at Seidnaya

Baptism ceremony

The town of Maulula


SAYYIDA ZEYNEB
We felt like staying in Lebanon for a while longer, but I had a flight out of Damascus so we drove back. On the day I left, I convinced Cole to take me to Sayyida Zeyneb, a major Shiite shrine and ground zero for the roughly one million Iraqi refugees who have flooded Syria recently. Security was tight that day, as in the many Syrian guards stood around more nervously than they had when Cole had visited earlier. The day before was an Islamic holiday so the place was overflowing with devotees, dressed in every manner of Arab outfit, from white Gulf Arab gowns to Palestinian kefiyes to the shapely turbans of Shiite clerics. The crowds shuffled around the courtyard making their way to the shrine, honoring a member of Muhammad's family. The inside was so packed that we couldn't have prayed even if we wanted to. As the only foreigners or non-Muslims in a shrine filled with religiously charged Iraqi Shias, we hardly felt at ease but we didn't have any problems or even attract too much attention. Nor was it a problem walking around the neighborhood, which was surprisingly orderly and functioning despite being populated by displaced Iraqis. It was not a place of fetid hovels and starving refugees. It was, however, strongly religious, without a single uncovered woman to be found anywhere. Posters and trinkets glorifying the Shiite martyrs, as well as Hezbollah and other groups were all over the place, more so than anywhere I noticed in Syria or Lebanon. The influx of restive Palestinian refugees once tipped Lebanon toward civil war. It makes me wonder how the new wave of pissed off and highly religious Iraqi refugees will alter the balance in their host countries.

Pressing our way into the Sayyid Zeyneb shrine

An Imam at the shrine

A Hezbollah exhibit at the Sayyida Zeyneb shrine
America, corrupted Gulf oil monarchies, and Israel--the three adversaries of Hezbollah and their ilk. I wonder if these are real Israeli flags.

Assad, Syria, Hezbollah and Iran. Even as the the Assads have brutally supressed Islamic challenges to their own rule, they like to portray themselves as the champion of Hezbollah and the Islamist cause.

The Sayyida Zeyneb neighborhood

Fish seller at Sayyida Zeyneb