A day in Damacus

A city tour of Damascus..through the walls of the Citadel into the Old City. The main street of the market, the Souq al Hamadyyeh was filled with people. It led directly into the remains of the Temple of Jupiter, once an imposing Roman Temple. What’s left are two huge Corinthian columns with decorated lentils with throngs of people selling their wares in between the columns.

It leads into the Ommayyad Mosque. After going into the “Special Clothes Changing Room” where all women get to put on ugly brown hooded cloaks, we headed to the mosque.

The site of the mosque dates back to 3000 years ago- to the Arameans in the 9th Century BC. They built a temple to their god, Hadad. Then came the Temple of Jupiter followed by a Basilica of St John the Baptist. With the Muslim invasion in 656, they converted part of the temple into a mosque. In 705, the Omayyad caliph decided to build a mosque without equal and it is truly amazing in scale- unlike any mosque we’ve ever seen. There are three minarets. Tradition has it that the “Minaret of Jesus Christ” will be the spot where Jesus will appear on Judgement Day. The mosque also holds the head of John the Baptist in the reliquary.

The mosque was filled with Iranian tourists who come here on pilgrimage. The guide was not a fan of the Iranians and told us that even though they can read the Arabic signs in the mosque, they choose to ignore them and use loudspeakers and take photos. We got to witness a mullah chanting to a group of chadored women sitting on the ground weeping and wailing.

From the mosque, you could shed your cloak and visit the Mausoleum of Saladin.
From there, we walked on the “Street called Straight” (Via Recta) into the Christian Quarter and to the Church of Ananias.

The Bible tells of Ananias, an early disciple of Christ, sent to the Street called Straight to touch the eyes of Saul of Tarsus and restore his sight (Saul was evidently a nasty Jew). Upon getting his sight back, Saul converted to Christianity and became the apostle, Paul.

To top off our tour, we drove up Mt Qassyoun for a view of the city. The day disintegrated from there…we got email with no good news about the house. We headed to the Sheraton to rent a car, only to find that because of the eclipse, all of the cars in Damascus were gone. The hotel staff warned us to stay inside on eclipse day from 11:00-5:00. The hotel was closing the pool, the grounds keepers were not to work outside after 10:00, all offices and businesses were closing. When we located a car- with a driver, we were told that the driver could not drive between 1:00 and 5:00. We finally tracked down a car from Budget- the agency company car with a broken headlight and dings and batters for $50 a day.

The country is interesting—a police state headed by al-Hassad. There are no ATM’s, no email, and no mobile phones. The people, however, seem to be fairly prosperous, the city is clean and it has a wonderful feeling of energy.

We taxied to dinner at the Casablanca Restaurant in the Christian Quarter- wonderful food.- only to return to our hotel to news that our car for tomorrow was not available….