Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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teacher.” Armen seemed melancholy at the sight of the school falling into disrepair. In a way, it was symbolic of the old Aleppo into which he had been born, always declining, always decaying. The new additions, the quality of the new buildings, did not seem to compensate for the loss of the old way of life.
We drove to the modern Chahba Oasis Hotel, nothing more than a collection of mobile homes, each caravan white with orange trim. Even the so-called reception was a small, prefabricated hut. “This,” said Armen, who was dissatisfied with the three-star rating the Tourism Ministry had awarded the grand old Baron’s Hotel, “is the four-star hotel.” The fourth star meant the Chahba could charge more, and the three stars kept the Baron’s just poor enough to deprive it of money to reinvest in improvements. We drove past what looked like a large apartment building. “In the sixties,” Armen said “that was the Montana Cabaret.”
“What is it now?”
“A mosque.”
Saad Qawakbi’s family had prospered under the Ottomans, and fought on both sides during the First World War. Qawakbi, now in his early sixties, had served as President of Syria’s Court of Appeals. As he drove me back to the hotel one evening after tea with his family, I mentioned how much lovelier Aleppo seemed to be than Damascus, because all its houses were of stone. “In Damascus, there is no stone. In Aleppo, we build with it, because it is available, not because people thought it was beautiful.”
Further on, he pointed out his law offices in an imposing building near the public gardens. I asked him, “You use the French legal system here?”
“It’s like France, but we don’t have trial by jury.”
“Why not?”
“It’s not good. In Europe, the majority is against the jury system. It all began with the case of the chevalier français. He was killed by his wife. The jury set her free. The majority of the jury were women. There are many such stories. If you amass a jury, one soldier, one farmer, they don’t know the law.”
Law had played an important part in the life of Syria from the earliest times, when the Mesopotamians brought the Code of Hammurabi, the Romans later imposed the Lex Romana and the Arabs introduced the Shariah Law of Islam. Different schools of legal philosophy inhabited different quarters of the great Muslim cities, and legal debates took place in the mosques. A teacher of Islamic philosophy had once told me a story, that he said was true, of a Muslim judge or qadi presiding at a trial. After hearing all the evidence, the qadi was considering his verdict. He noticed the defendant was laughing. “Why are you laughing” the qadi asked him, “when it is my soul that hangs in the balance?”
A lawyer I met later in Damascus told me the government had begun dismissing high court judges who decided against it. There were no juries. Who could trust a soldier or a farmer to deliver a fair decision when souls hung in the balance and lawyers appointed by politicians were so much more reliable? And when even the judges appointed by the president himself to the highest court failed to bring in the required verdict, what was a government to do?
That evening Armen took me to a little sandwich shop near the hotel. It looked like an empty pharmacy, but Armen assured me it had the best sandwiches in Aleppo. Armen had ordered the sandwiches in advance by telephone, telling me the man took a long time preparing his food. When we arrived a half hour after the call, the sandwiches were just being toasted. The man wrapped the sandwiches, small French loaves with meat and spices inside, in paper and handed several to us. “Do you want a Maria or a Toschka?” Armen asked me.
“What do you mean?”
“Here,” he said, “try the Toschka. There is a story that goes with these sandwiches.” Without waiting to hear whether or not I wanted to hear the story, Armen told it. “There were two girls here who fled from Hungary during the 1956 revolution. One was named Toschka, and the other was Maria. They got jobs as dancers in the cabarets, you know, exotic dancers.” His voice dropped an octave as he said the word “exotic.” “Every night, after their show, they would go to Waness’s restaurant for a snack. Toschka missed Hungary and told Waness that she wished she could have something to eat to remind her of Hungary. He promised her, ‘Tomorrow, I’ll have something special for you.’ Okay, so, Toschka and Maria finished their cabaret act the next night and went to Waness for their snack. Waness gave her a sandwich of sojok, melted cheese and spices.”
Sojok was a dark, hot Turkish sausage, which some Armenians said was Armenian. I was eating the Toschka as he spoke, and it was delicious.
“Toschka said the sandwich wasn’t really like in Hungary, but she liked it. She asked him what he called it. Waness thought for a second and said, ‘Toschka, for you.’ Maria said she wanted a sandwich too, the same as Toschka’s, but without cheese. This explains why, in every sandwich shop in Aleppo, you can order a Toschka and a Maria.”
Armen bit into his Maria, chewing on the bread and sojok. “Not many people,” he said, “know the true story. And if you write about it, don’t get it wrong, like your friend from the Chicago Tribune.”
Armen insisted he had told the same story to a correspondent from the Chicago Tribune. He assumed all journalists knew one another, so I was held at least partly responsible for the fact that readers in Chicago were under the mistaken impression that a Maria had cheese and a Toschka didn’t.
Aleppo has the best and most extensive souqs in the Levant. They run for miles along cobbled walks, under the domes of stone roofs. Their only natural light comes from grilles overhead. They look like tunnels that had been excavated, not the man-made structure that had expanded west over the centuries from the Citadel to the Antioch Gate of the old city walls. Too narrow for cars, they seem to have remained unchanged, except for their roofs, from the time Ibn Jubayr saw them in the twelfth century:
As for the town, it is massively built and wonderfully disposed, and of rare beauty, with large markets arranged in long adjacent rows so that you pass from one row of shops of one craft into that of another until you have gone through all the urban industries. These markets are all roofed with wood, so that their occupants enjoy an ample shade, and all hold the gaze from their beauty, and halt in wonder those who who are hurrying by.
When Ibn Batuta came to Aleppo from his native Morocco in the fourteenth century, he found the bazaar “unique for its beauty and grandeur.” Six centuries on, the Aleppo souq had far more peasants, gypsies and bedouin, more Kurds, Turks and Armenians, a greater variety of peoples, than the bazaars I knew in Damascus, Jerusalem or Beirut. It remained more Ottoman, more a piece of a vast empire of diverse peoples, languages and religions, than a piece of a nation-state, limited officially to one people, one language, one faith. It breathed variety, heterodoxy, life.
Each of the thousands of shops inside the souq specialised in making or selling something, and similar shops were usually grouped in the same quarter: there would be a row of ropemakers along one corridor, goldsmiths in another, silversmiths, spice sellers, rug-merchants, carpenters, butchers, candlemakers. Each turn in the winding alleys brought with it new sights, new smells. Spices were on display in large, open burlap sacks: hundreds of pounds of fresh thyme, sesame, mint, crushed pepper, cardamom and cumin, ready to be scooped up with small shovels and weighed in brown paper bags. Carpenters made chairs, tables, desks and cabinets to order, and their souq was a constant whir of lathes and electric saws, the floors all around covered in sawdust. Some shops specialised in soap, often made of olive oil, shaped like bricks and sliced like bread, some varieties scented with lemon or thyme. Children crowded into the sweet shops, where fresh chocolates, sugar-coated nuts and coloured bonbons lay on open trays. The patisseries specialised in a variety of Arabic pastries, made of honey, flour and pistachios, some in layers, others wrapped in strings of dough as fine as vermicelli.
In the gold souqs, windows were ablaze with row upon row of bracelets, necklaces and rings, many in a finely woven mesh known as Aleppo gold. In the mornings, bedouin families would flock to the gold shops to buy jewellery for the women and girls. They would sit on stools in the shops, men, women and children, examining each piece carefully, trying gold rings on babies’ fingers, putting necklaces on the wives. As secure wealth, gold had been better to the bedouin