I’ve always had a bit of a wild streak in me.
And in my twenties, it appeared more often than it should have.
What’s worse is that I spent two of those years living in a country that was much more conservative than the United States.
On the other hand, I lived in a country whose police had been told by President Hafez Al-Assad to leave foreigners alone, since they brought in hard cash, which the Syrian government needed, as their own currency was not traded internationally and pegged at a rate of 50:1. Which it most definitely was not worth.
And in my time there, I began to forget boundaries.
It started simply with excursions around the country.
The expatriates who had lived in the country for a few years swore by Monuments of Syria, a book written three years earlier by the former Australian ambassador to the country.
I’m not sure what diplomatic responsibilities Mr. Burns had while working in the country, but there couldn’t have been many. The book is meticulous in its descriptions of EVERY manmade structure in the country.
If there were a single block carved by the Turks left in a ditch next to a road 23 miles north of Aleppo, Burns found it, told us how to find it, and described what we would see in detail.
This focus on detail extended especially to directions, since the Syrian highway and road systems were not made for English speakers.
For each monument, Burns offered specific distances based on signs on the major highways leaving Damascus, and my absolute favorite of these was when we decided to go see an old Byzantine church in southern Syria occupied by the Druze.
I don’t have the book in front of me, so unlike Burns, let me approximate what the directions to the church resembled:
The directions were precise; the oak tree stuck out from the grasslands, and there, in the distance, sat an old Byzantine church.
There was nothing around it. It was humorous, thinking a man would materialize from thin air…until we arrived at the entrance to the church, and a few minutes later, some man dressed in local garb approached us with a key to the church.
The church? It was cool.
The most accurate directions ever given in the history of mankind? Completely overshadowed the monument.
And then, you’re fired.”
I’m jumping forward a bit here, but on 17 December, 2010 a street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest the corruption of the Tunisian police, among other things. This self-immolation led to what we call the Arab Spring, and in a few places it succeeded.
It did not succeed in Syria.
Protests started about a month later following the arrest and beating of a man in Old Damascus.
In March, a group of schoolchildren were arrested for protesting the government, and Syria erupted. For months, the world wondered if Syria would open up like other nations (like Egypt) had done – after all, Bashar Al-Assad (Hafez’s son) had grown up in England.
But it wasn’t to be.
On July 31, tanks rolled into a number of Syrian cities and attacked the protesters, which started the Syrian Civil War.
Shortly thereafter, those moderates among the protesters were sidelined by more radicals, and the country was engulfed in flames. To this day, parts of the country are still under fire, and over a million people have fled.
Not surprising, the ancient artifacts of Syria haven’t done so well.
Ross Burns’ love of Syria never went away.
In 2011 he started his website named after the book to keep alive the memories and spirit of Syrian history.
If you get a chance, stop by and check out some of the amazing places the country had to offer.
Unfortunately, some of them don’t exist anymore, such as the Citadel of Aleppo.
Where I broke yet another rule.
…to be continued…
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Your life is a series of cliffhangers, isn’t it?
Was the old Byzantine church anything nice? Did you get a pic?
Guessing we won’t find a Google Street Maps image of it (I hope!)
I really have to find that book!!
That website looks as comprehensive as the book. Whatever Mr Burns’ actual duties were he looks to have provided an invaluable repository of information.
Wonder if the man with the key is still around.
There’s no way! You ever see Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade? Imagine that knight, but Middle Eastern.
30 years would be a lot to ask.
I just googled the Citadel of Aleppo. Oh, my. What a loss. I checked to see if it was used as a film location. No. Maybe there’s a Syrian film that didn’t make festival circuit utilized it. I can see the Bruce Lee/Chuck Norris smackdown(from The Way of the Dragon) being shot there.
Ron Fricke, who directed Baraka and Samsara, must have tried. He got permission to shoot at some seemingly impossible places, but no Syria.
I have to laugh. My friends and I deemed Ann Arbor too arduous a journey last year.
My WA friend, however, went to Milwaukee to buy an amp.
The destruction of ancient buildings just makes my soul ache. I imagine that, like in Iraq, there were some looters who took advantage of the chaos as well.
After all, how else can The Bible Museum in DC get new exhibits?
I stopped visiting Wikipedia to keep track of leveled buildings in Ukraine. People first, above all, of course. (That death toll can’t be accurate.) On a general public message board, if you express angst over the loss for the inanimate, you get a bunch of knee-jerk responses: But what about the people?
Yeah, put like that, my comment does sound somewhat thoughtless, and I don’t want to minimize the strife and loss that people there have been subjected to.
At least for me, the preciousness of human life is baked into a reverence for history and culture. It’s a big part of why it has such tremendous value.
No. No. No. You got me all wrong. It’s like if I mourn the loss of Anne Heche, and somebody says, but, oh, what about the woman who lost her house.
Question. I like how Prince says this. I’m getting weary of both-sideisms. When my daily posts articles about Ukraine, there’s this guy who takes Russia’s side. When I respond, my post gets taken down because I’m not allowing that person to have his say. That’s not a question; that’s a paragraph.
Question. Is that a valid point if it’s obviously clear that the person is being contrarian for the sake of contrarianism?
That seems to be the dominant question of our era.
There’s no great way to deal with this encroaching relativism and pervasive bad faith. I just try to pick my battles judiciously, and try to find the nugget of truth in whatever BS a person is spewing. If I can isolate the truth from the distortion, maybe at least other readers can appreciate the effort.
Still, if everyone is allowed to have a say, why aren’t you allowed to rebut someone’s comment?
I started reading this and thought to myself – I wonder how many of these locations thegue’s going to talk about that got destroyed in their civil war?? Rather interesting that’s exactly where you were going with this. It was quite heartbreaking to see how much of Syria’s history was being obliterated during the fighting, and no doubt what we actually heard about on US news outlets was just a small percentage of what was actually lost.
Anxiously awaiting the next installment as always!