Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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href="#ulink_77682f72-921d-54ec-b20c-ea1f3623f076">A CONSULAR CITY
And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
I took him by the throat the uncircumcised dog,
And smote him thus. [The Moor stabs himself.]
Othello, Act V. Scene ii
Aleppo was the world’s first consular city, in the modern sense of the word consul. Until the Ottoman Empire permitted Venice, and later France and England, to station diplomats in Aleppo in the sixteenth century, ambassadors represented their sovereigns only in the capital, at court. Aleppo, the first provincial city with diplomats who looked after their own resident and visiting nationals’ interests, retained a certain pride in its consuls. Several Aleppo families carefully guarded their rights to act as honorary consuls for a variety of foreign countries, and the title “consul” still accorded some status to its holder.
The old Venetian consulate lay down one of the twisted alleyways of the souq, past the ropemakers and spice-vendors. I walked inside, through fortified wooden gates, as though into a castle, leaving behind me the darkness of the covered souqs for sunlight shining on an open courtyard. This was the Khan Nahaseen, or Nahas’s Caravanserai, large stone vaults on three sides which had become, in the years since the death of the camel caravan, a workshop and warehouses. The consulate was above the caravanserai.
Christian Poche, nephew of the consulate’s owner and last resident, Adolphe Poche, met me at the door. He looked like a retired teacher from France. He was thin, with just the impression of middle-age fat showing below the chin and above the belt, and had a full head of hair just going grey, a light moustache and no rings on his musician’s hands. He had arrived recently in Aleppo, the city of his birth, from Paris, where he worked as a musicologist. He had returned because of the grave illness of his uncle, Adolphe. Adolphe Poche’s only child was a daughter, and Christian had no sons. He was the last Poche in a long line of traders and consuls.
“When,” I asked him, “was the house built?”
“I’ll show you,” he said. He led me along the hallway, which looked like the passage to a dungeon in a Spanish castle, and showed me the date carved into the wall. “1599.” The date stone had been covered in glass. “The house is in two parts and has twenty-one rooms,” he said, sounding like a bored tour guide who had said all this before. “In Aleppo, they spoke at that time three European languages: Catalan, Venetian and Genoan. This house was built as the consulate of Venice, the Serenissima Republic. After that, it became a Capuchin monastery, but not for long.”
“How long was that?”
“Maybe one hundred years,” he answered. “We have some papers from the Capuchins. After that, it again became the Venetian consulate. My great-grandfather came here from Austria. He settled in Aleppo, and he married the daughter of the last Venetian consul. I think that was in 1807.”
The doorbell rang, and Christian Poche left me standing in the long corridor, with paintings and statues along both walls, a long Persian carpet on the floor and a low, vaulted ceiling. I was looking at an 18th-century portrait of a beautiful woman when Christian returned with two men.
“She was the last woman from the Serenissima Republic,” he said. “With her are her professor of music and a Turkish servant. So, you have an idea what it was like here.”
I already had some idea of the grand life in Aleppo of the old European consuls, whose families had over generations become Levantine, creatures half-Oriental, half-Occidental, hybrids of the eastern Mediterranean world. I had heard about it from Adolphe Poche, the last consul of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on a previous visit to Aleppo. Now Poche was ill, dying, the last of the old, courtly school of Levantine diplomacy.
Christian Poche had with him M. Farid Jiha, a man whom I had met earlier at the Baron’s and who offered to show me around Aleppo, and a French diplomat. The diplomat, a young man who spoke only French, was introduced to me as M. Berti. Jiha and Berti followed us around the house, and I felt that they had imposed on my private tour. It was only much later that I would learn the reason for their visit, which was more purposeful, if less tactful, than mine. Christian showed us his uncle’s study on one side of the corridor and the family chapel on the other.
“The grandfather of my father, who was Austrian,” Christian Poche said, “is the reason why you have here the portrait of the last emperor of Austria, Franz Joseph. They kept contact with Austria, because Vienna was for us and for Aleppo the nearest important city in the West. It was difficult to travel by ship. From the land, Vienna was important for Syria and especially for Aleppo. This is why so many Austrian influences stayed in my family.” He spoke as he walked slowly through the grand house, a little palace on the first floor above the khan. “You see here,” he said, indicating some vases, “Chinese porcelain, because Aleppo was on the Silk Route. The caravans, when they left east Asia, they came to Aleppo and sold this kind of porcelain. Aleppo is one of the few towns in the Middle East where you see it. Now it is very, very rare. Most are 19th century. In Damascus, you can’t find these, because Damascus was a religious town. Foreigners could come to Aleppo, not Damascus.” He showed me an oil portrait of a European in Oriental dress. “My great-grandfather. When he came from Austria after Napoleon’s war in Egypt, he settled in Damascus. It was forbidden for a foreigner to wear European clothes there, so he was obliged to wear Ottoman dress. He left Damascus, because it was impossible to stay, and came to Aleppo.”
The Poches had amassed an eclectic collection of art and furniture, with something from every era in Syria’s and Aleppo’s relations with the outside world – bas reliefs, busts and stone statues from Palmyra, Hittite statuary, Roman mosaics from the Euphrates, 18th-century paintings from Austria and France, dark wooden tables from Spain, tapestries and ceramics from China, carpets from Persia and Kurdistan, and drawings and photographs of the Poche family over the ages.
M. Jiha and M. Berti were carefully examining everything they saw, occasionally picking up a vase or picture for close inspection. They whispered between themselves, lingering behind in some of the rooms after Christian Poche and I had moved on.
Christian showed me some 11th-century ceramics. “These are from Raqqa on the Euphrates. In the 11th century, Raqqa had many large porcelain factories. Then the Mongols destroyed them all.” It seemed sometimes that everything the Syrians built over the ages had been destroyed by one conqueror or another. I wondered why they didn’t rebuild, but assumed they feared the next round of destruction.
M. Jiha and M. Berti handled the Raqqa porcelain, holding the pieces in their hands as though weighing them. They seemed to agree it was quality stuff.
M. Berti asked Christian some questions, and I went to the window. Below was a small garden with so many trees it looked like a miniature forest. Beyond was a wall which separated it from a side street in the souq. Although we were only about ten yards from the street, which was too narrow for cars, I could not hear any of the noise of people walking and talking. The peace, the tranquillity of the house and the garden, surrounded by similar houses above khans and streets without cars, made it seem like Venice, another place on earth which owes its wonderful silence to an absence of cars and trucks. To think the whole world was like that only a century ago.
Christian Poche came to the window and looked out, and smiled at me as we shared the view of the garden. “My uncle is very ill,” he said. “I think he has only a few days, and he will die.”
“How many Poches are left?”
“I am the last one. I am the son of Rudolphe, Adolphe’s brother.” Christian had a sister, and Adolphe a daughter. He had no children.
“What will happen to the house?”
Looking around at M. Jiha and M. Berti, who were poring over the books, Christian said, “I’m not sure.”
He led me through a kitchen and up to the roof, which the family had used as a terrace. It joined the other flat roofs of the old city,