We were feeling foolish but lucky. After all, we’d decided to embark upon a self-guided, 10-day driving holiday around Syria, against the advice of every guidebook we’d consulted, the Damascenes we’d met – who looked aghast at the suggestion – and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office website. Not, mind you, because of masked men lurking in the hills but the very real danger of road accidents.
Escaping Damascus the previous day had been an adventure in itself. The traffic, which fizzes around the old walled city and up into the wider streets of the modern-day capital, had repeatedly foiled our feeble attempts at navigation before spitting us out onto the main road heading north towards Aleppo. Somehow we’d managed to survive the improbable one-way system, avoid pedestrians, pot-holes and U-turning taxis, and obeyed the many soldiers-cum-traffic police who orchestrate the chaos at every junction with the blast of a whistle and the flick of a white baton. Neither of us really understood how we’d made it out alive, but the car horn was working just fine.
With nerves and our marriage barely intact, we had cause to celebrate as we turned off the main highway and onto the long straight desert road to Palmyra.
Before us lay 220 stress-free kilometres, and it was finally time to take in the view. As the traffic dwindled to the occasional lorry, heavily-laden, and headed to the Iraqi border, a few Bedouin tents stood out on wind swept ridges in the yellow distance, as did the family of five that we passed, speeding along on a single, underpowered motorbike.
After three hours, and many a sign to Baghdad, we rounded a bend and drove down the cobbled street that takes coach loads of tourists right through the centre of the famous ruins. As we checked into the Zenobia Hotel, which overlooks the archaeological site, we marvelled at the fact that there were only two or three other sight seers wandering over the remains, next to an oasis planted with date, palm and pomegranate orchards.
Still known locally by the ancient Semitic name of Tadmor, Palmyra dates from the second millennium BC and is mentioned in the Bible. The city became a prosperous staging post for merchants and travellers on the trading route between the Mediterranean and India and China.
Standing beside a small cemetery, one of Cyrrhus’ most striking landmarks is a second or third-century hexagonal-shaped Roman tomb, rather oddly crowned with a Corinthian capital. Alamy / Photolibrary
Its markets sold spices, fabrics, precious stones and metals, and it reached the height of its prosperity under Queen Zenobia, who invaded Egypt and famously defeated the Roman army, before the city was razed to the ground by Emperor Aurelian in 272. What remains today is a curious hotchpotch of Hellenistic, Roman and Parthian architectural styles.
Apart from a young man offering camel rides, and a few other touts, zipping up and down on motorbikes flashing postcards and trinkets, the ruins felt remarkably undisturbed by the present day. There are very few signs to help tourists unscramble the history and it’s possible to ignore the construction of a number of new hotels that will soon ring the site.
Without hordes of tourists snapping away, walking the length of the colonnade towards the fortress-like Temple of Bel felt like stepping back to the time of curious gentleman travellers who romanticised Palmyra and longed to stand in its shadows. Of course, this daydream turned out to be pure fantasy: when I later looked up drawings of Palmyra made when it was first “discovered” by Robert Wood and James Dawkins in 1750, it’s clear that many of its carvings are now either eroded beyond recognition or simply missing.
Today, parts of the site have been reconstructed, and the jumble of masonry sitting in the sand has been neatly numbered by generations of archaeologists. The famous crime novelist Agatha Christie accompanied her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who dug at Palmyra from 1934 to 1939. Staff at the Zenobia were only too pleased to show me the Contessa suite where Christie stayed: decorated with traditional wooden furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the rooms are not grand by five-star standards, but it does have uninterrupted views of the ruins – albeit through barred windows.
The next day we bolted our breakfast, keen to hit the road – this time for the less-visited remains of Rasafa. However, the state of that road was cause for some concern. Close study of the map revealed that we had two choices: head back along the route marked in red towards Homs, then double back to Rasafa; or take what appeared to be a cross-country track marked only with a pale dotted line. “It is a short distance but the road is unlevel,” the hotel receptionist explained.
A few questions later, we discovered that he was an English teacher at the local school, but we were still none the wiser as to what unlevel really meant – neither steep nor, apparently, potholed. He assured us that our scarred saloon car would survive the trip, and so with only a large bottle of water for supplies, we turned left out of the hotel driveway.
Second century Roman bridge on the road to Cyrrhus, northern Syria. Nick Leech
On the map, the turning to Rasafa forks north from a dot called Al Sikhneh. This turned out to be a town small enough that if you drive up and down the main street a few times, you will be seen by everyone who lives there. After a final humiliating manoeuvre in the main square, before a curious all-male audience, my husband jumped out to ask for directions. In my roles as driver and dutiful and modest wife, I waited in the car with the engine running. It was to become an oft-repeated ritual. Outside the main towns, few people spoke English but it was always enough to smile, say “Salaam alaykum” and point to the destination in Arabic in our guidebook while looking helplessly lost. In this way over the next week, my husband flagged down dozens of shepherds, construction workers, lorry drivers, motorcyclists, mechanics and farmhands. Whoever he hailed, the response would always be the same: a broad smile, and gestures that we understood to mean “just keep going”.
Finally, thanks to the advice of a small crowd of men decked in bushy moustaches and jellabiya, it seemed we were on the right road. A small sign to Rasafa appeared as we reached the very edge of town, just as we were about to lose hope and turn back to the refuge of the main road. A small coach appeared in my rear-view mirror, surely a sign that this must be the way to a tourist attraction. It disappeared again just as quickly and suddenly we understood what unlevel road meant as our car sprayed up enough grit to sandpaper the car and we peered through clouds of dust. Two hours later at a top speed of 15km an hour we reached a tarmac road just as panic had begun to set in. Even though we were in a car, and not trekking on foot across the desert, the sense of isolation and unchanging scenery was enough to bring on despair. In the nick of time, Rasafa had appeared.
The walled city of Rasafa became a well-known place of pilgrimage for followers of St Sergius, a Roman soldier martyred in 305 for refusing to make sacrifices to almighty Jupiter. Today, it is still possible to see delicate carvings on the dome of the basilica and the enormous size of the buried cisterns, the largest of which would have held 15,000 cubic metres of water, and sense some of the site’s former grandeur. Considered an important example of Byzantine architecture, it – like so many sites in Syria – has not yet been fully excavated and feels almost forgotten.
There is no entrance fee, no ugly signs to divert your attention, and certainly no cafe selling coffee and flapjacks. Like invaders, we climbed over the fortress’ walls and wandered uninterrupted. We found the large clay handle of an amphora lying discarded underfoot, but most amazing of all was the way that the walls, almost two kilometres long and made of local gypsum stone, shone in the strong, spring sunlight.
Heading north-west towards the refuge of Aleppo, the road shadows the great Euphrates, and the landscape changes: sand, grit and rock are replaced with greener, irrigated land, boy shepherds grazing their animals in the central reservation and rubbish as far as the eye can see. At one spot, industrial chimney stacks belted out enough smoke to make the sky almost appear on fire as the sun set behind. We craned our necks disappointed not to be able to see Lake Al Assad on our right, and had to make do with spotting fellow travellers instead. On the back of almost every flatbed lorry, there were people bobbing about; some sat on plastic chairs, smoking, others perched precariously on bales of cotton or boxes of oranges. A boy stood spread-eagled on the bumper of one, like a GI Joe action figure,clinging on to stacks of boxes for dear life.
The next day, after a night in Aleppo, with its twisting souq and hugely impressive citadel, we continued our odyssey north to the Turkish border, intrigued by the guidebook’s lyrical description of the Kurdish farmers’ lands, complete with olive groves and yet more shepherds. Not to mention some of the most pockmarked roads that we’d yet tried to navigate. It was slow going with many false turns: the narrow road undulated, sometimes tarmac, more often gravel, and, in the many small villages made of breeze block houses, a muddy mess of gaping, watery holes, thanks no doubt to heavy farm machinery. Our intended destination was to be the remains of Cyrrhus, the little that’s left of the city founded on a hill in 300BC. A peculiar second or third-century hexagonal-shaped Roman tower tomb in the field below, crowned with a Corinthian capital, marked our destination.
The real highlight of our meandering six-hour journey, however, proved to be the two second-century Roman bridges that we bumped over on the way to the tomb. Only five metres wide, and made of massive stones but without kerbstones to keep vehicles from slipping over the side, each spans a noisy river. When we left the car to listen to the birdsong and the sound of water rushing past; the air was clean and fresh – a valuable commodity in such a polluted country – and this part of Syria felt distinctly wintry and unmistakably European. My mobile phone beeped with a text message that read: welcome to Turkey.
When we finally arrived at Cyrrhus, exhausted by the effort, we couldn’t face schlepping up the hill to see yet more ruins and contented ourselves with a brief sprint to the tomb, where tractors were parked outside. The journey had proved more worthwhile than the goal but, strangely, it was no less rewarding for that.
Our thoughts turned to the journey back to Aleppo. Reluctant to retrace our path, we drove on, finally rewarded by a signpost and a main road, but then, with the light fading, we came to a halt: the way ahead was blocked by a huge mound of gravel. It was the end of the road. Ready to give up, we finally understood the value of hiring a local driver who would have known the quickest route from A to B without swearing and wasting time via C.
Then, our saving grace appeared. Dressed in fatigues, jellabiya and a kaffiyeh, Mostafa was a charming old man, well into his seventies, who pointed us towards Aleppo before jumping into the back seat and presenting me with a strongly scented narcissus flower. Unable to speak a word of English, we managed to introduce ourselves in pigeon Arabic before our hitchhiker directed us, left, right, and off-road around the side of a church when a funeral procession blocked our route again.
Without Mostafa’s assistance we would have spent the night in the car; instead we found ourselves speeding towards Aleppo, accompanied by the sound of his prayer beads clicking. The sighs from the back of the car gradually became louder until Mostafa slapped his chest and said something to my husband. Busy dodging other cars like bullets, I asked: “What did he say?”. My husband maintained a diplomatic silence while I quickly figured out that Mostafa had asked to drive so that we’d get to Aleppo more quickly.
Eventually we reached a busy roundabout on the outskirts of the city where he asked me to stop the car. We watched as he disappeared into a crowd of people buying and selling goods at makeshift stalls, but not before he planted an enthusiastic kiss of thanks on my husband’s cheek. The meeting, full of warmth, a few misunderstandings and good humour, was like our stay in Syria and felt all too brief.
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