Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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evenings, I would see old bedouin women, perhaps widowed, coming to sell the necklaces, rings and earrings that their fathers or husbands had given them years before.
In one corner of the souq, not far from the Citadel, an old man sat in front of his shop. On his head he wore a red tarboosh, or fez, the traditional hat of Syria’s urban middle and upper class. A tarboosh maker, he seemed to do just enough business to keep alive. He said he was the last of a trade that used to employ hundreds of people. He made all his tarbooshes to order, measuring each customer’s head and fashioning a wood or metal mould to exactly the right size. With his mould stored in the shop, as he would leave his suit measurements with a tailor, the customer could order as many tarbooshes as he liked as they wore out over the years. Unlike suits, which might expand with age, a man’s tarboosh never changed.
Traditionally, the tarboosh had permitted the urban male of the Ottoman Empire to cover his head, but remain free to press his forehead to the floor in prayer. Its disappearance began in Turkey, where Atatürk banned it as part of his campaign to turn Turks into Europeans. Sir Steven Runciman had told me when I went to his house in Scotland before my journey to Syria, “I first arrived in Constantinople in 1924, but at that time women still wore veils. You still saw tarbooshes on every head, and camels crossing the bridge over the Gold Horn. I went back next in 1928. The veils had gone. The men were all wearing cloth caps instead of tarbooshes. And the camels were forbidden.”
An amusing, irreverent American travel writer, Harry A. Franck, also noted in 1928, “The red tarboosh has as completely disappeared from Turkey as the dinosaur.” Franck noticed that the Turks found it impossible to go bareheaded and difficult to wear European caps. “Even today, after two years of practice, something like six Turks out of ten, at least on the Asiatic and less sophisticated side of the Bosphorus, will be found with the vizor of the cap on the side of the head, or protecting the nape of the neck. Not entirely from ignorance, either: when a man has worn a fez for many generations, an awning over hitherto unshaded eyes may be annoying.” He went on, “It is easy to imagine what the thousands of fez-makers in Turkey thought of the Head-dress by Decree. Most of them have gone to Syria, Palestine, Egypt, for few were adaptable enough to change their trade …” With the demise of the tarboosh south of Turkey, the fez-makers had nowhere to go – except possibly to America to work for the Shriners. The tarboosh and its craftsmen were going the way of the camel caravan, dying with the last generation born under the Ottomans.
Along most of the passageways of the Aleppo souqs, there were khans. These old caravanserais, or inns, were places for commercial travellers of centuries gone by to put up for the night with their escorts and their animals, where they would do their own cooking and sleep in their own blankets on the stone floor. In the hotel age, the khans had become warehouses and workshops. Near most of them were mosques, where I saw men washing before prayer.
Ritual washing was an important part of Islam, and keeping the body clean was a Syrian tradition predating the Romans. Before private plumbing put most of them out of business, Aleppo had hundreds of public baths. Only a few remained. One was the Hammam Yughul opposite the Citadel, an elaborate octagonal building in finely cut yellow stone where tourists were welcome, but where I found it impossible to enjoy a Turkish bath. It was afternoon, and the bath-keepers had turned off the steam. They let me undress and told me to wait in the bath for the water to heat up. I waited for about half an hour and gave up. I walked down to the Hammam Nahaseen, just opposite the old Venetian consulate in the Khan Nahaseen. The Hammam Nahaseen did not have the Tourism Ministry seal of approval that the Yughul proudly exhibited, but it had the advantage of working. From the souq above, I walked through an open door down stone steps to the large foyer. Around the green walls were divans, for resting after the baths, and in the centre of the room was a fountain with the soothing sound of running water. I left my clothes on a divan, and an old attendant led me into the baths. He turned a valve, and steam hissed out of pipes near the floor. Stone basins against the walls had taps for cold water. The main steam room was surrounded by small alcoves, like cloisters in a monastery. In one alcove, an old man with a short beard, and one closed eyelid where his eye used to be, waited to wash me. He told me to lie down, then scrubbed my skin raw with a glove that would take the grease off a frying pan. Then he washed the newly exposed layer of skin with a soft, hairy cloth. I went back into the steam room, sitting on a stone bench and sweating out all the Armenian brandy the Mazloumians had given me since I came to Aleppo. The masseur was away that day, they told me, so I could not have a massage. I rinsed myself with cold water from one of the basins, scooping it up with a tin bowl and pouring it over myself. I had been there nearly an hour, sweating and washing, before another old man wrapped me in towels and led me back to the divan in the foyer. He took the towels off me, and wrapped me again in fresh cloths.
I lay on the divan, resting, and a boy brought me tea. From the divan, I could see the feet of people treading the cobbles of the souqs above. When the muezzin called from a mosque nearby, several of the bath attendants set out their prayer rugs and prayed. I dressed, paid 55 SL and, feeling cleaner and far better than I had before, resumed my exploration of the souqs.
I went back through the covered souqs and out again to the fresh air at the western end of the markets. There I found the souq of the tomb-makers. In one yard, an old man and a young boy were working with hammers and chisels, carving names, epitaphs and verses from the Koran into marble and stone. Each one sat, quiet and intent, pounding rhythmically, tapping the words, letter by letter, by which we would know the dead. This was where the life of the souq ended, at its western edge, near the gate in the city walls that had long since come down.
Walking around the souqs to the wide road on the east side, facing the Citadel, I found a café and sat at one of several tables outside. A minute later, a young man sat down at another table. He was a study in white, white Wrangler jeans, white open shirt, white zip jacket, white tennis shoes; but from the neck up, he was dark: dark glasses, black hair slicked back and a dark stubble. When he turned to call a waiter, his jacket lifted a little to reveal a 9mm. pistol tucked into his belt. I took out my notebook and began to write about the souq. I included something about the man in white, who undoubtedly worked for one of Syria’s many security bureaux. If he was following me, he would not be the last man in Syria to do so.
I looked for the waiter to order coffee when I noticed someone else and wrote in my notebook, “Strange, as I sit here writing, I turn around to look for the waiter to order coffee. What do I see at a table behind me? Another Western, middle-aged man writing. Perhaps he is writing the great Levantine travel book of the twentieth century. Who knows?” I wondered whether he saw the parade in front of the Citadel and jotted, as I did, “Four women, one very old. All with faces covered, three holding parcels wrapped in cloth on their heads. A man with his son perched on a bicycle. Yellow taxis rushing round the Citadel like traffic around L’Etoile in Paris. Men in suits or sweaters walking. Two teenage girls coming home from school: one with a white headscarf, the other with a dress over her school uniform and her face covered. Students wear military-style uniforms at school. Tiny children in brown smocks on their way home from school.”
The ancient stone battlements of the Citadel, so well reinforced by the Ayyoubid prince Nur Ed-Din in the twelfth century, were giving way to earth and weeds. The moat was dry. The fortress that was Aleppo’s refuge and defence for centuries had become a tourist attraction, closed on Tuesdays, where the Tourism Ministry was reconstructing what it called an “authentic Turkish bath.” If I had been a medieval invader, I could not have taken it with ten thousand men. Its walls were too high to scale and too thick to penetrate with catapults. No wonder Ibn Jubayr had written at the height of its glory that “an assailant who wills it or feels he can seize it must turn aside.” Like Aleppo herself, the Citadel had not adapted well to modern times. Aleppo had lost much of its purpose with the demise of the caravan, and the Citadel had become a mere decoration in the age of modern warfare.
On its parapet in electric lights, most of them broken, were the Arabic words, “Unity, Progress, Socialism.” The Baath Party slogan rang hollow in Syrian ears that had heard them too often. Below the battlements, I watched a flock of goats, sure-footed on the stones, as they wandered up the great walls eating weeds. Where a hundred armies had failed, goats were succeeding.