Desert Oasis
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
28
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
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Palmyra,
Syria
Tuesday, February 28, 2006
Arnika, Alex and I left for Palmyra one morning. It was again a bit of a hassle to leave Damascus. As usual, we had to show our passports when buying our bus tickets. Once again circumstance proved that the fellow writing up the tickets could not read the Latin Alphabet. Holding my passport, which says "CANADA" in gold letters, he asked me if I was from Japan. I said no, Canada. And yet again, he responded by "Japan??" Again I corrected him and he only got the picture when I said "ana Kanadi," meaning 'I'm Canadian' in Arabic. If you don't get it, take a look at my mug at the top of the page. Hours later, Arnika and Alex were still laughing about it. Now when touts and hawkers ask me where I'm from, I tell them Japan...
By one o'clock, we were seated at the back of a bus heading towards Iran. It would stop to let us off on route in Palmyra, albeit at the edge of town. Having already seen the desert, I was slightly more prepared for it. I could have pretended to avoid it altogether on the bus ride if I wanted: the curtains on all the windows were completely drawn when I got on, as is the custom. Closing them keeps a bit of the heat out, because on most buses the AC doesn't work.
Palmyra Photo 1
I bravely drew back the curtain by my window: sixty kilometers beyond Damascus, all that was visible were the sandy hills of the desert expanse. Arnika and I were on the same wavelenth and we tried to remember the term for "fear of open spaces." I'm actually not over dramatising this point. First hand, the prospect of being stuck in the desert is quite frightening. It kind of hit me how quickly a person would die, even a healthy person, if he were left for a day out there, without supplies.
We tried to cope with the heat on the bus. An eight year old girl in the seat ahead said "hello" to us until she got a disapproving glare from her veiled mother. Then she stared at us for most of the trip, except when her little brother fell out of his seat and wailed a bit.
When we got to Palmyra, the bus dropped us off well out of town, next to a hotel with which the driver obviously had some sort of devil's pact. Palmyra's lay out is simple, and we were able to walk to our inn of choice by walking down a long road, through groups of school kids playing. All the small ones said "hello hello hello hello" to us. Everyone we passed took a moment to gawk at us. We figured that this must be what celebrity is like. All that staring was pretty intense, and I was glad that I only had 500 meters of fame.
After ditching our bags in the inn of our choice, we ran off to see the ruins. The sun was on its way down and the light was absolutely perfect for taking photos. Around 4 pm, the sun makes most rock positively glow.
Palmyra Photo 2
I went clickcrazy with my brother's digital camera. The light was something else. Among the ruins, we were accosted by camel drivers, men with motorbikes and kids hawking post cards at four times their price in a store. The ruins have no gate so anyone can wander through at any time, and these creatures are resilient in the face of rejection. A boy selling postcards, for example, will follow a person until either someone else comes up or the followee walks too far away from the ruins. Perhaps the hawker will leave the person who buys his wares alone after the transaction. It's not all that bothersome, but it is as much a part of a visitor's experience as is staring at the excellent ruins of this ancient city state.
Beyond thinking itself worthy of rivaling Rome 18 centuries ago, Palmyra was also known for its school of statue carvers, who had a particular style to their work. They carved with a slightly more pourous stone than other carvers around the Empire, but they also had a particular way of shaping faces and eyes.
The Palmyrian school of carving seemed so stylised, but then I saw one of the hawkers. His face was remarkable: His cheeks were thin like those statues of the Palmyrian school. His eyes were shaped like those in the statues too, as was his nose, his jaw, his forehead and the curl of his hair. Alex, Arnika both noticed it too. If he was albino, I think we would have had a living statue right there. So perhaps the Palmyrian school of statue isn't the school some archaeologists think it is.
Palmyra Photo 3
Perhaps the Palmyrians just looked like that. The ruins themselves are huge: upon a hills to the West towers a castle built by Fakrehedine, a Lebanese governor, in the 17th century. To the south is the valley of tombs, a sandy valley with gravestones sticking out (except these are usually a few storeys high). To the East is a great colonade: Roman era columns line a street for the better part of a kilometer. Along the way is a restored theatre with camels in it, and a market place. At the far end of colonade is the temple of Bel. It was gigantic Roman site of worship, fortified by Arabs and thus surrounded by walls.
Although the temple closed early, the next day we saw inside: In the middle lay the temple proper: both niches which were the most sacred of places (holy of holies) still had their ceilings. I was amazed to see the style. You've seen it, I guarantee. It is a common design, with a circular design in the middle. I was disappointed only to realise that designers have been copying this style without much modification at all, and that in the field of ceiling decoration up until the 20th century, there seems to have been no innovation since the Romans!
The rest of the temple grounds were lined with walls. It's not visible from the outside, but every wall has been vandalised at specific points. Ages past, someone wanted the metal used as supports really badly. The cut niches in every stone joint on every wall to get a finger's worth of lead and iron out. Columns lay all over the temple grounds, and in certain spots tunnels had collapsed.
Palmyra Photo 4
Alex and I found the entry to an uncollapsed tunnel, and crawled in. We shuffled a dozen meters underground, toward the another opening. We saw two other collapsed passages as we passed. The temple must have once been just lined with these tunels. I can just imagine the priests, running to and fro, from inside one statue to another, voicing the words of the gods. Behind the temple was the Oasis which helped make Palmyra rich enough to (try to) rival Rome. I expected a small oasis; a few palms and a little pond. This oasis stretched as far to the East as the eye could see from atop a ruined column (that gave a good panorama). As the sun set on the 27th, we wandered into the Oasis, to see what we could see.
Inside was a labyrinth of roads lined with mud brick walls 2 m tall (on average). Palm trees rose from the gardens, as well as olive trees too. From time to time the level of the wall would be fairly low, and we could see into the gardens. Below the trees was virtually no undergrowth, just patches of grass. The sandy dirt had been arranged to keep water around the base of the trees.
While walking through the maze of roads, a bedouin on a motorcycle invited us to his garden to share tea with him. There was a kettle of lukewarm tea on a grill above burnt out coals. The bedouin sort of cleaned some little cups and he poured the tea for us. Alex's Arabic was much much better than mine, so he and the bedouin shared a sort of conversation about what sort of trees were in the garden, and how to harvest them.
Palmyra Photo 5
In fact his Arabic was not stellar, so we ended up having a bit of a biology lesson conveyed mostly through gestures. Alex and the bedouin continued to converse about gardens, and then the fellow had the idea to show us his garden. We thought we were in it, but it turned out that we were in one of his friends' gardens. So we followed him down a ways down another path as he pushed his motorcycle along. This path may have been two meters wide, and about a third of it was taken by a four foot deep drainage ditch, made damp by a trickle of water. Perhaps it would have been a bit too hazardous to ride the motorcycle along the path. Or maybe the bedouin was being courteous.
We followed him a hundred meters before he stopped at an iron gate to unlock it and let us in. Inside, we followed him over the dirt he had raked by hand, between the palms, and stopped at a cinder block hut. He explained a bit more about plant biology, and then gave us each a handful of fresh dates. They didn't look like much, and I never liked dates before. A handful of them later, I decided to change my mind.
We spent our evening in the inn. Tasyer, the hotelier, was dumped by his girlfriend five days ago. Marja from Finland was the love of his life, and Tayser couldn't eat his dinner so instead he fed it to us. To console his broken heart, he listened to a cassette tape of Shaggy's 2003 hits (CDs haven't caught on yet in Syria). Unfortunately the cassette only had five songs on it, and there wasn't much else to do in Palmyra.
So for the next three hours, we played cars with him, while Shaggy sang (is that what Shaggy does?) and occasionally Tayser repeated the least appropriate of his lyrics. Every five songs, Tayser sang along and encouraged us to "give her [halib]." Alex and I nodded our heads in that polite and subtle way that most people interpret to mean "I'm being polite, but I don't actually approve." Arnika put on a brave face.
We played a variation of a four player trump game, not unlike hearts, but it was far simpler. Tayser wasn't such a bad guy but he sure did get emotional about the card game. He was only 22 so probably it was the affect that being dumped had on him. He got us to sign his guestbook, and while flipping through it, we noticed a number of entries written by him. One was a Valentine's day open-letter to Marja. Another was an anti-war drawing.
Because all men must do military service in Syria, Tayser had done his and he willingly told us about it. He had to do two and a half years, right out of high school. They shaved his head, and made them stand naked in the cold and the summer heat, then they sent him and his companions on 100 km desert treks, and three of his friends didn't have to finish their service because they died first.
He beat up his sergeant and they sent him to the brig for three months. He told us that he liked that a lot more than marching, so he did it again. I have to sympathise. I was sweet on a Finnish girl once too. I know what it's like. I should be less flippant about these things. If I was paid $6 a month to be a conscript, I think I would have been just as enthusiastic.
[The next day, we visited the rest of the ruins before catching a bus back to Damascus]
