Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
Armen and I had dinner together in the empty hotel dining-room under an old photograph of President Assad, while a young Kurdish waiter named Jemal carried each course silently from the kitchen. “I thought the hotel was full,” I said. “Where is everyone? “
“They all go out to dinner, with their families or to restaurants,” Armen complained. “They don’t spend their money here.” Later, he said he would take me to see the Dead Cities, whenever I had time. “When are you going?” I asked him.
“I’m always going, at least three days a week.”
After a meatless Good Friday dinner, Armen invited me to enjoy the first of many glasses of “Ararat, 6-Star Armenian Brandy”. It went well with the Turkish coffee, and I would eventually come to agree with his father’s pronouncement, “This is the finest brandy in the world.”
In the morning, as I was going into the dining-room for breakfast, Alishan called me from the reception desk. “Do you need any other books to read?” he asked me. He opened a drawer in his desk and pulled out a dozen old paperbacks in English and French. I looked through them and took a worn copy of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. He would not take any money, so I gave him A Tale of Two Cities, which I had just finished. He did accept money, however, for the old postcards of Aleppo he kept in another desk drawer.
In the dining-room, a European diplomat who was visiting from Turkey invited me to join him for breakfast. I asked him if he knew about the people living in the “No-Man’s-Land.” “They are the lucky ones,” he said. “In the last six months, Turkey has sent at least five hundred Iranian refugees back to Iran. Some of them had already been guaranteed refugee status in Canada and Sweden. The Turks just sent back two Iranian pilots and the plane they escaped in two months ago. Now, the pilots will surely be executed and probably the others as well.”
“What can you do about it?”
“I sent a report to my government. And I tell journalists like you.”
“In other words, nothing.”
“Nothing,” he said. “That’s the worst part. Your country gives money and arms to the Turks. Maybe America should do something. You should do something.”
A tall building of the same stone as the hotel, the Mazloumian family’s three-storey house lay just behind the hotel’s rear terrace. The ground floor was nearly empty, a few old prints hanging on the walls and unused, covered furniture on the floor. On the first floor, Armen showed me what his father called the “antiquities room,” its walls nearly hidden by the large photographs Armen had taken of the Dead Cities, wonderful pictures of the old churches, the tombs, the villas and summer houses of the last Romans to dwell in Syria. Over the years, he had created what was probably the largest photographic collection on earth of the ruins, of the same churches from different angles, dozens of villages at different times of the day, monasteries in all seasons.
We walked up to his parents’ apartment on the second floor. He unlocked the front door, and suddenly I was back in England. We went through the foyer into the drawing-room of an English country house that might have belonged to a soldier or a diplomat, retired from a life’s service in the East. Below a carved wood mantelpiece at the far end of the room, flames were devouring dry wood in the fireplace. Above the mantel hung an oil painting of a black spaniel. The wall to the left was a bookcase, containing hundreds of old volumes, many on the Levant, including early editions of Russell’s 1756 The Natural History of Aleppo; an 1810 edition of Henry Maundrell’s A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter, 1697; Richard Hakluyt’s The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation; and The Travels of Ibn Jubayr. There were also the six volumes of Blackwell’s edition of Churchill’s memoirs, Burkes Landed Gentry 1952 and bound editions of Punch from the 1930s. Facing the shelves was a large, upholstered couch, and stuffed chairs circled the fire. On tables and walls were family photographs of prosperous Armenian burghers in early twentieth-century Aleppo. There was one of the young Krikor Mazloumian and his English wife, Sally, a nurse at the Altounyan Hospital in Aleppo when they met in 1947. A pretty blonde, she looked like an actress playing a nurse in a World War Two movie. I saw how easily Armen’s father must have fallen in love. There were pictures of their three daughters, who had married and left Syria, and of Armen as a boy. The long wall behind the couch had a large picture window, carved in dark wood as in an Elizabethan manor. Once it had presented a fine view of gardens, trees and the old city. All it revealed now was an ugly urban landscape of unfinished, bare concrete at the rear of new office blocks.
Armen led me past a baby grand piano, on which there were more family photographs, asked me to sit by the fire, and went to tell his mother and father we were there. Comfortably settled, listening to the crackle of the burning wood, I looked out of the window and tried to imagine the view before the new buildings had been erected. Again and again, while in Aleppo, I tended to see the city not as it was while I was there, but as it must have been before I was born, as Krikor Mazloumian and the other aged citizens of the city remembered it and painted it for me. I took The Travels of Ibn Jubayr from the shelf and looked up Aleppo in the index. On June 14, 1184, the Muslim year 580 AH, the Arab traveller wrote:
Aleppo is a town of eminent consequence, and in all ages its fame has flown high. The kings who have sought its hand in marriage are many, and its place in our souls is dear. How many battles has it provoked, and how many white blades have been drawn against it? Its fortress is renowned for its impregnability and, from far distance seen for its great height, is without like or match among castles. Because of its great strength, an assailant who wills it or feels he can seize it must turn aside. It is a massy pile, like a round table rising from the ground, with sides of hewn stone and erected with true and symmetrical proportions. Glory to Him who planned its design and arrangement, and conceived its shape and outline.
The town is as old as eternity, yet new although it has never ceased to be. Its days and years have been long, and the leaders and the commons have said their last farewell. These are the homes and abodes; but where are their ancient dwellers and those that came to them? Those are the palaces and courts, but where are the Hamdanid princes and their poets? All have passed away, but the time of this city is not yet. Oh city of wonder! It stays, but its kings depart; they perish, but its ruin is not yet decreed.
But for the intrusion of the new office blocks, I could have seen the citadel on the hill. The fortress was the most impressive in the Levant, one of few the Crusaders neither built nor conquered.
Ibn Jubayr believed in the legendary origins of the city’s name, from a story of the Biblical prophet Abraham’s stay there: “We say that amongst the honours of this castle is that, as we were told, it was in early days a hill whither Abraham the Friend (of God) – may God’s blessings and protection enfold him and our Prophet – was wont to repair with some flocks he had, and there milk them and dispense the milk as alms. The place was therefore called Halab.” The translator explained that the Arabic word halab meant “milk” and that Aleppo was a Europeanised version of Halab. Aleppo, like its southern rival Damascus, claimed the title of the “oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.”
An aged, bald man walked slowly into the room. Wearing a green twill suit, leather waistcoat, checked shirt and striped tie, he looked like the lord of a Somerset manor on a Sunday stroll. “Looking at Ibn Jubayr, eh?” he asked. “What will you drink? Brandy?”
Krikor Mazloumian was in his eighties and had gone blind in one eye. The other eye, Armen had told me, was under severe inter-ocular pressure, causing him constant pain. His voice was as rich and deep as any younger, healthier man’s. In English, he sounded British; Austrian friends told me his German was so fluent they took him for a Bavarian, and he was equally at home in French, Armenian, Arabic and Turkish. He poured tumblers full of Armenian brandy for both of us and sat down in the large chair that was obviously reserved for him. Although his style, the furnishings of his house and his manner of speech were English, his real passion was Armenia. “You Americans,” he said, dismissively, “are so blind about ideology that you won’t understand Armenia. All we want is a place for our culture and our national life to breathe.”
“Is it breathing in the Soviet Union?”