On Monday morning, after feeding Natalie and getting our things together, we jumped on a bus to Homs, two-hours north of Damascus and then hired a taxi for the remaining hour west to Krak des Chevaliers, an enormous and well preserved crusader castle perched on the outcropping of a mountain. The scenery on the way there and around the castle was refreshing. Damascus and its immediate environs sit amidst mainly barren desert, the result of rapid, unplanned human expansion. Especially in the warmer months it gets quite dusty and there is little green to speak of—the most I’ve seen so far in any one place is on the soccer field at the Damascus Community School (the “American School”), where I play pickup once per week. The way from Homs to Krak, however, sat amidst plentiful green wild grass, agricultural fields, and, once we got closer to the mountainous region around Krak, apple, fig, and olive orchards.
We arrived too late to tour Krak on Monday night so we just went to our hotel, Hotel Bebers (really Baybars, after the Muslim general who defeated the Mongols, took over Syria, and established a Caliphate with its headquarters in Cairo in 1261). The hotel provided decent accommodation for the price we negotiated and had stunning views looking out over a valley toward Krak. But it was COLD. Apparently to save money, they kept the electricity off for most of the daylight hours and did not turn on the central heating in the main hallways. Our room had an air-conditioner that also heated, but it didn’t really warm much more than the four or five feet in front of it—and with Syrian insulation it was practically useless. When we went to sleep we bundled Natalie up in extra clothing and piled three blankets onto her while we slept in full clothes and two comforters. At least we had an excellent dinner at a nearby restaurant of mezze (including a surprisingly delicious beet dish), chicken, and kebab, so we didn’t go to sleep hungry and cold.
A view of our hotel from Krak:
On Tuesday morning when we woke up we couldn’t see more than two feet beyond our balcony railing, the fog was so thick. Fortunately, by the time we had eaten breakfast, fed Natalie, and started on our walk to the castle the sun had started to cut through the fog, and as we explored Krak we had excellent views of the surrounding countryside, including the 1,300 odd year old monastery of St. George down a valley to the northwest. The day proved perfect, as we got to see Krak and the countryside through the mist in the morning and then under the sun in the early afternoon.
The view out of our window when we woke up:
After the fog had lifted a bit:
St. George's Monastery from Krak:
A view from one of Krak's walls:
I would not have wanted to be in the first wave of attackers from an invading army attempting to take Krak. The outer walls, both of the inner and outer fortresses are sheer and tall. The entrance ways are small, contain numerous turns and heavy doors that one would have to break through, and are open to fire from all directions, including boiling oil from above. Krak’s inhabitants had stores to last for five years, making a siege almost impossible. For these reasons, Krak was never actually taken by force, just by subterfuge, or after a period when it had been abandoned. When the French took control of Syria after World War I they found the ancestors of the town currently surrounding it living inside the castle walls. In the 1930s, they paid them off to move out and then cleaned and restored parts of it, allowing for the tourism that still goes on today.
Inside Krak's inner fortress:
The moat between the outer and inner fortresses:
After lunch at the same restaurant we ate dinner at the night before (more delicious mezze!), we hired one of our hotel’s owners to drive us to Hama. Hama lies in the Orontes River Valley about an hour-or-so north of Homs. It doesn’t take long to get there from Krak via the autostrade, but we decided to take the scenic route, stopping at Misyaf, an Ismaili fortress, along the way. The first two-thirds of the trip to Misyaf took us through the mountains along winding roads past terraced orchards and fields with great views of the valleys below. Misyaf looked impressive from the outside; we couldn’t go in because the entrance was locked—we forgot that all tourist sites except the most popular (like Krak) are closed on Tuesdays in Syria. The rest of the way from Misyaf to Hama was flat. We arrived in town around 4pm and, after deciding not to stay in the hotel we had made a reservation at, found another one with equivalent services for less than half the price up the street (the Cairo Hotel).
Misyaf:
For dinner on Tuesday night we went to a mediocre restaurant. The view from our table partially made up for it, however, as we could look straight across the Orontes to an old mosque and water wheel, lit up in the night. The darkness hid the incredible amount of garbage and pollution in the Orontes, and the fact that the windows were up in the winter relieved us of the sewage-like smell emanating from it. Syrians do not take good care of their natural resources or environment. We have found historical sites that require entrance fees to be reasonably clean, but any other public space is often filthy.
On Wednesday, we hired a driver for the day to take us to Apamea and the Dead Cities. The former site was a Roman regional capitol, one of the cruxes of trade connecting goods east and south of Syria to Turkey and Europe. It is an enormous site. Except for a long, impressive cardo with massive pillars on each side, however, it remains almost totally un-excavated, requiring an impressive imagination to wonder what it must have looked like in its entirety in its day. Our driver dropped us off at the entrance to one side of the Cardo and we walked most of the way down it to meet him on the other. Except for one other group of people and a few Bedouins on motor bikes trying to sell us coins, we were alone at the site. That other group contained the Chinese ambassador to Syria, however, and along the way Rachel made friends with him. He ended-up inviting her over to the embassy to practice Chinese and watch movies, and we plan to take him up on his invitation.
From Apamea it then took an hour-and-a-half to get to an area with a number of “dead cities,” stopping at a falafel place in a small town on the way for lunch. Again, we took a more scenic road at the expense of speed. The terrain this time wound up, down, and amidst green rolling hills of farmland and orchards, in between rural towns. There are tens of “dead cities” interspersed amidst modern-day life, most dating from the Roman and Byzantine eras. At first, historians imagined them as idyllic vacation and farm spots of villas and vineyards. Later theories, however, believe they were simply peasant villages with the extra space to build comfortable houses. Whatever the truth, nobody knows why they were abandoned, leaving the ruins that remain today. We went to one of the most compact and well-preserved cities, Serjilla, and spent a good two hours wandering throughout sarcophagi, churches, a cafeteria/pub, and the famous “villas.” On our way back to Hama, our driver drove us around the extensive ruins at Baraa, which are all the more spectacular today because they sit amidst a modern-day olive orchard, their pyramid-shaped tombs peeking out through the leaves.
Before moving on to Thursday, I should pause to say a bit about our driver. He proved to be a perfect fit for us. The father of three children, he was very conscientious towards Natalie, offering to stop whenever she started crying so that we could feed or change her and reproaching us with “haram, haram” (“shame, shame”) whenever we told him that we didn’t need to stop. He talked constantly, which might normally have been annoying, but in this case it gave us a chance to practice Arabic for seven hours. He also turned out to be just a thoroughly nice, salt-of-the-earth kind of guy. Having lived through the former Syrian President Hafez al-Assad’s quelling of a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982, which leveled the city and killed somewhere between 10,000-25,000 people, including three of his brothers, he seemed to love just being alive, spending time with his family (he said that he doesn’t venture far from home), and making friends (he knew everybody along the route we took). When we mentioned that we would like to learn how to cook Syrian dishes, he invited us up to Hama for a day to receive lessons from his wife and tour the area with his sister. Another fun-fact: he married his wife when she was thirteen and he was nineteen. Without any choice in the matter, his father informed him one-day that he was going to get married and who he would wed. Fortunately, everything, he said, has worked out. We had such a good experience with him we’re thinking of hiring him again on future tours in the area.
On Wednesday night, we ate at a great restaurant, Orient House, in a restored old Arab house in Hama. Natalie fell asleep during dinner and the owner brought us a couple of chairs where she splayed out until we finished.
Thursday, we took a bus up to Aleppo where we stayed for two nights in an impressively restored old Arab house that is now a “boutique” hotel:
After arriving and eating the leftovers from Wednesday’s dinner, we met up with some friends from Damascus in the souq in Aleppo’s old city. We happened to run into the “keeper” of one of the Khans there (formerly travelers’ inns, now commercial spaces) while looking around, the Khan al-Saboun, (soap khan, which no longer contains soap stores), and he took us up onto the roof of the souq where we were able to view the city from a vantage point most do not get. Afterwards, we strolled through the souq for a while and then retired to our hotel before dinner.
Dinner that night deserves a special mention. We ate at Qasr al-Wali (The Governor’s Palace), where we had a royal feast of hummus, bourekas, grape leaves, tabouli, French fries, muhammara (whipped red pepper, nuts, olive oil, and spices), and three kinds of kebab, including the highlight of the meal: cherry kebab, for which Aleppo is justly famous. I would count the meal as just as good, if not better, than our previous experience at Naranj in Damascus. Overall, in our four days total in Aleppo, we’ve found the food to be better than Damascene fare.
On Friday, we hired a van with a couple of friends and went to the Castle of Saint Simeon, a basilica built on the site where St. Simeon, a famous ascetic, spent most of his life perched on a tall pillar, in the heat and cold, taking questions from pilgrims below. The site is very impressive but the day we were there it was raining, which limited our ability to walk around with Natalie and impaired the supposedly great views from the site.
Where St. Simeon's pillar used to stand:
When we got back to Damascus we shed our clothes that had gotten wet and went to what turned out to be another fantastic restaurant for lunch, Zmorod. Their chicken with olives and lentil soup were excellent, and the fried eggplant, tomato, onion, and garlic appetizer with fresh baked pita bread was even better. To top it all off, we received a free fruit and Turkish delight plate for desert. Even Natalie got in on the experience, eating a couple of mashed up banana slices and some orange. The restaurant appeared to be the hot current place for the Aleppan elite to eat. Despite feeling a tad under-dressed (for lunch on a Friday!), we wondered afterwards whether this in fact had been the best meal that we’d had so far in Syria. It was certainly equal to Qasr al-Wali the night before. We will be going back to both the next time we go to Aleppo.
It poured the rest of the day on Friday and we spent most of the time in our hotel room before eating at what seemed a rather pedestrian Beit Wakil (the second best restaurant in the city according to Lonely Planet) after our two previous experiences—although their cherry kebab was still tasty.
Saturday, we walked around the old city souqs some more, bought 1.5 kilos of Aleppo’s famous soap and made it to a few other minor sites we wanted to take in and then found some falafel on our way back to the hotel. It was raining again most of the day so our activities were somewhat limited. As I write, we’re on a train heading back to Damascus, scheduled to arrive just before 8pm.
This post is already too long, but we never wrote anything about our previous trip to Aleppo at the beginning of January, so I’ll say a few words here. Aleppo has a different feel than Damascus. Without the central government’s ministries here and the pressure of being Syria’s capitol, it seems more laidback than Damascus. The people that we have met have, generally, been nicer. On a few occasions they have refused tips and one cab driver even refused any payment for our fare, even after running his meter. In Damascus, people avoid making eye contact on the street and almost never smile at Natalie. In Aleppo, they consistently returned our smiles and frequently stopped to engage us in conversation about Natalie, curious to see our carrier and ask where we were from. Damascus seemed this way when we visited in 2005. Perhaps in the interim the people have become more jaded towards its increasing tourism and see the tourists as more of a nuisance than an oddity and opportunity to meet foreigners they don’t normally see.
As for sites, the three most famous and impressive sites in Aleppo are its souq, Umayyad mosque, and citadel. I won’t bore you with details about the two of them right now. We’ll leave it up to some of our pictures from early January to do the talking:
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