Syria As Only Memory
When history is not kind
Every place I’ve been stays with me.
Not just the images and impressions. Some tiny part of me doesn’t leave. I care about them, long after moving on. I like to think that the people who impacted me in some positive way went on to live happy lives.
Most of the time, it's probably true. Even during times of economic collapse, the emergence of a shiny new dictator, or creeping modernity that chips away incrementally at tradition and the very identities of the inhabitants, the inertia of a place usually keeps it recognizable. People adapt and hold on to their futures.
Sometimes, however, it is difficult to be convinced of that. Enter the case of Syria.
I was surprised to get the visa so quickly from a cordial and efficient consular staff. My country has an eternally sour political relationship with Syria. This was true during my visit in 1992, as it has been ever since. But they stamped it in at the embassy in Cairo without a word.
Syria was a police state. Most Middle Eastern countries have always been explicitly or implicitly that. What I said and wrote could be scrutinized and used against me, including any literature they inspected at the border. I was exceedingly careful with my travel journal — my entries from visiting Israel the week before had been written in code, heavily wrapped in metaphor and joking innuendo, with no direct place names. It turned into a game because sometimes humor is the only defense against such bullshit.
I wandered through Dar’a, just after crossing the border from Jordan. This town featured the ruins of Bosra, the name it was known by during Roman times, and the Al-Omari Mosque, one of the oldest in Syria and hence, in the world.
Twenty years after my visit, in 2011, it would be the tinderbox that sparked Syria’s version of the Arab Spring, when a group of boys was arrested for spray painting anti-government slogans. Many townspeople rose in protest, soon joined by many others throughout the country. This would be the most serious challenge to the ruling regime before its spectacular and sudden fall in 2024.
It was sleepy town when I visited, crammed with traces of human history that stretch back thousands of years. I could not know that, from 2011 until 2018, it would be largely obliterated by shelling, and tens of thousands of its occupants killed or imprisoned by the Assad regime.
Damascus is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on the planet, but no one called it by that name. Instead, the taxi drivers going there would call out ash-shams, meaning ‘the sun’ in Arabic. Everything goes around the sun. It was a name uttered with pride. Once, the city was a lynchpin in dominating the ancient world, situated at the fuzzy, contested boundary of ‘East’ and ‘West’.
On the streets of Damascus, I had one of the best raspberry juices of my life, from a roadside stall. The Great Mosque of Damascus, completed in 715 CE under the Umayyads, remains one of the most compelling Islamic buildings I’ve ever seen, with its three architecturally distinct minarets.
On my closet door in the hostel, someone had scrawled DAWN WITH USA. I assumed they meant ‘down’, but didn’t want to add to the vandalism by correcting it.
Damascus did not escape the damage wrought upon many Syrian cities during the civil war. It was the last government holdout before the regime’s collapse in 2024. The Great Mosque was impacted by shelling, and one of the walls and minarets was brought down by tank fire.
It was easy to make friends on the streets. Syria was not a popular tourist destination, and my presence elicited curiosity. Conversations were in English, French, and as much as I could manage with my limited Arabic. Sometimes, sitting for hours, plied with tea and pastries, and asked in detail what I thought of the country.
The people generally seemed content, hopeful for their children’s futures, hospitable, and full of relaxed humor. The omnipresent portrait of their dictatorial leader, Hafez Assad, that hung on the wall of every business felt watchful but also irrelevant, like wallpaper. It was like visiting a parallel world where there were two moons. Eternal bodies that were just fixtures in the sky. Why would anyone talk about them?
All references in my journal to Assad were coded ‘The Ice Cream Man’ out of an abundance of caution.
Palmyra, also known as Tadmur in Arabic, lies almost at the center of the modern state of Syria. It boasts a stunning array of Roman ruins at the edge of the modern-day town. During my visit, in the heat of summer, I had them nearly all to myself, rising before dawn each day to tour them on foot.
A local musician in Tadmur befriended me, a flamboyant old soul who confessed that he wasn’t religious in the slightest and was surprisingly dismissive of the unbending adherence all around him. I sat with him on two successive evenings, drinking tea outside an alley cafe until late. His lack of faith was an odd admission. Perhaps he sensed that, as an outsider from the hedonistic ‘West’, my sympathies would align.
I have always wondered what happened to him. Tadmur was attacked and occupied by ISIS (The Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) in 2015. Their promulgation of Sharia law, intolerant of anything but the strictest forms of Islam, would have been fatal for anyone not conforming. Many public executions were held in Tadmur, as they were in other cities under ISIS control.
What happened to the fantastic Roman ruins of Palmyra is a matter of record. ISIS partially destroyed them as part of their program to rid the world of pagan monuments. My photos of the temples and columned streets can now only be a memory.
Downstream along the Euphrates River was the town of Abu Kamal. I had no reason to be there, other than to get as close as possible to the Iraqi border. Many women of this region walked the streets with their heads uncovered, which was extremely rare in other cities. While sitting in a weedy park, unsure about what to do next, I was approached by Kemal, an old man who offered me lunch. He was a minivan taxi driver, but he wasn’t working that day.
At his home, his wife and five children were waiting. The family went into a flurry of food preparation, and soon we ate, sitting on the floor of their kitchen, gathered around a large communal plate of pita bread, meat, and okra.
The afternoon I spent at Kemal’s home was one of my best memories of Syria. A family of seven packed into a small living area, excited to host a random foreigner, for no other reason than to be welcoming.
I did my best to describe my origins, occupation, and what I had seen of their country. They overlooked the poor Arabic grammar and commended my effort. It was clear from the conversation that all the children had dreams of someday attending university. There was so much hope and life bound up in them.
There was, of course, a portrait of Assad on the wall. At one point, in explanation of her plans for the future, the oldest daughter looked up at it adoringly and placed both her hands over her heart. I didn’t fully understand what she was talking about, but there again was that sense of visiting a parallel world, where promise and joy could be felt in undying allegiance to something I could not fathom.
I have thought about this family so many times in the thirty years since. What came of these children and their dreams? The political continuity they trusted has been wiped out. So many things have happened in this remote corner of Syria since my visit. So many bad things.
In Aleppo (Halab in Arabic), I stayed in a hotel that also served as a brothel. The owner tried to convince me that sharing my room with one of his employees would refresh and calm me (his words, according to my journal entry). Women called out to me from the stairwell every time I went out, and one showed up at my door, pouting when I wouldn’t let her in. It was annoying, but harmless enough, even funny.
Aleppo, like Damascus, was another city with an almost unfathomably long and complex history. The city bazaar and hilltop fortress were UNESCO World Heritage sites that needed days to do them justice.
The city was subject to some of the worst destruction of the subsequent Syrian civil war, much of it pummeled to rubble by a combination of fighting between rebel and loyalist forces, and aerial bombardment by the Russians (who were helping the loyalists). The remaining civilian population fled.
Most of that is probably gone now. The ungracious things I penned in my journal about my Aleppo hotel seem callous and ignorant. It would be nice to think that the owner and his resident prostitutes (or whatever occupations they moved on to later) got out alive and survived as refugees in Turkiye.
There were many more interactions, more conversations, more sharing, more sugary tea. In every town and city. All of those places have jumped out in news articles in the years since, for all the wrong reasons.
I sat for hours with two medical students in Latakia, who spoke at length about their classes at a local university and their thoughts on the future. They mused that Australia would be a good place to emigrate for work. Australia was on their minds because it was the country I was pretending to be from that day. Lying about my nationality seems dishonest, but mention of the US often proved a distraction from conversations I preferred to have.
On the ferry I took back from Arwad, Syria’s only island in the Mediterranean, there were several families, all local tourists. A woman suddenly stood up and pulled a small drum out of a plastic bag. It was identical to those being pushed by street hawkers on the island. She began to beat it while others clapped. Some women stood up to dance, and soon they were all having the time of their lives, while their husbands sat silent and rooted to their seats. It was like an unspoken contract — this was the moment for the women to let loose and have fun.
Syria stands out in my memory because it felt so human. I connected with its people more than those in the neighboring countries of Jordan, Israel, or Turkiye. Now, the country has been irreparably torn. The justifications and outcomes of what has transpired in the last thirty years are not for me to adjudicate. The human cost, however, is not in question, nor is the damage to the physical manifestations of their history.
It seems some countries exist only under tyranny or in chaos. No one bears the violence of either scenario more than normal people, the ones most likely to greet you when you walk down the street.
I could go back to Syria. The protests and conflicts that paralyzed the country during the rule of The Ice Cream Man’s son (Bashar al-Assad) have resulted in a new government and an end to the war. It remains to be seen what better national vision might emerge, or how long peace will last before the country fractures again.
But part of me does not want to return. I don’t want to see the shattered remains of Dar’a, Palmyra, ash-Shams, or Aleppo, or discover the fates of the people I met so many years ago. It would dismember the fantasy that everything worked out for them.
Maybe Syria can only exist as a memory now. The part of me that stayed is better off frozen in time.
This reminds me so much of our experience in Sudan and our feelings about returning some day.