12. Aleppo

(this is going to be a long story, a sad story – with plenty of somber photographs and a few uplifting ones)

Aleppo used to be the commercial capital and the biggest city of Syria, bigger than Damascus. My guidebook, from 2010: ‘In Aleppo 80% of its old monuments inside the walls have survived’ and ‘in the winding lanes of the souk you will come closer to experiencing a medieval city centre than anywhere else in the Arab world’. But that was before the war.

The old town of Aleppo has, sadly, not survived. The central square, and everything around it, is destroyed. The narrative? We are being told that the Turks occupied the town, came to steal all the goods from the shops, then set fire to them, and took the bounty to Turkey to sell it there. Government troops fought street by street, corner to corner, but they never dropped bombs on the city, all the big time damage is done by those damned rebels, whose actions were instigated by the Turks. Rebels are terrorists, terrorists are rebels, these terms are interchangeable.

(My own sources, that I used earlier to compile some historical background, do state that opposition militias took Aleppo in 2013, although there is no mentioning of the Turkish army at this stage; the destruction of the city is mostly attributed to indiscriminate bombing by Russian and Syrian airstrikes. From where I stand today in Aleppo, I cannot judge either way, of course.)

Some buildings, especially religious ones, have been, or are being restored, I suppose once again because that is where the money is. Houses and shops remain covered in rubble, or in the best case they are a skeleton, without doors and windows.

We walk on to a more lively area – an area where houses are still lived in -, with fruit juice sellers and ice-cream shops, and we end up at the most famous falafel shop in Aleppo, a city already famous for its falafel in itself.

Ultimately we reach the Saadalla Al-Jabri Square – I know because this is where the I-love-Aleppo letters are, but as we follow our guide, I find it difficult to get an orientation of the town, where we have been exactly. But the square is fun, I play a bit of football with a couple of kids, admire the bicycle of another youngster, and get the chance to informally chat with their parents as well; not without taking pictures, of course. But the chat is mostly limited to ‘where are you from’ and that sort of talk, the language barrier proves too big for meaningful conversation.

Our second city walk, the next morning, starts at the Citadel. According to our guide the area around here was destroyed by ISIS – there is no mention of rebels here, let alone civil war.

(My internet resources indicate that Aleppo has been subject to fighting from 2012 to 2016, with government forces initially losing control, but regaining ground through massive bombings, although ISIS also played its part, and no doubt the rebels, the opposition militias, will have made their contribution to the destruction, too – https://www.getty.edu/publications/cultural-heritage-mass-atrocities/part-2/10-bandarin/)

The Citadel is an impressive structure, on a hill, with a massive wall around it. Built in the 12^th C by the Ayyubid dynasty, it is a fabulous defensive complex, surrounded by a moat, and designed in such a way – false doors, a zigzag entry way to slow down charging horses – that attackers could not quickly penetrate to the heart of the structure. Inside it is difficult to distinguish between what is deterioration over the ages, and what is recent damage. Apparently, the civil war has affected the citadel relatively little, but one will need to define ‘relatively’, of course, given the extreme destruction in the rest of the city. But parts of the structure are still standing, there are the cupolas of a hammam, the walls and the entrance, in for the region so characteristically black and white patterns, of a small mosque, a tall square minaret and a palace, or another mosque, from which the interior seems to be dating from the Ottoman period. And a large, open area, where little construction remains, just rubble.

From the citadel we walk to the old covered bazar, which starts at the base of the hill. It has largely been destroyed, not just the shops, but also whole sections of the corridors, roofs collapsed. Just imagine the vivid trading that took place here earlier, from the little shops that are now no more than burnt-out stone cavities in the walls. However, a little further on workers are busy clearing rubble, and restoring the shops. They are wearing UNDP coveralls, illustrating where the money comes from. And in one section the restoration of shops has been completed, or rather, new shops have been built, with big new wooden doors. And some are already back in operation, selling sweets, shawls, spices, the usual souq fare. But the atmosphere is sterile, nothing compared to the busy feeling in any other Middle Eastern souq. Lost forever, probably.

The disadvantage of traveling in a group is, that the group sets the tempo. There is not a lot of time left in Aleppo, we have to move on. We skip the other most famous monument, the Great Umayyad Mosque, but perhaps we do this because there is little left of this 8^th C building, based on the foundations of a 6^th C church, and once adorned with an elegant and graceful Seljuk-style minaret from 1095 AD. No more.

We do visit the National Aleppo Museum, the outside adorned with black basalt lions and other figures from an Aramaic temple dating to the first millennium BC. Our tour guide maintains that these are the originals, which I think is unlikely – and indeed, or so claimed my guidebook already in 2010, these were replicas then. Inside the museum, an impressive collection from some of the oldest archaeological sites in Syria, Mari, Ugarit and Ebla, even older than the Aramaic temple figures. No photographs allowed, of course, but I do manage to sneak a few pictures, of the most famous artefacts – which I have found in other books, as well, so I don’t feel that guilty.

Aleppo in less than 24 hours. Missed opportunity, or simply not much more left to see, these days?

next: to the mosaics museum and Apamea