Crossing the border from Turkey to Syria was pleasanty quick (only 2 hours) and followed by a night of "bush" camping in a parking lot of a local gas station. But it was free, came with clean toilets and the seaside was just across the road, which made for a great swim and an amazing sunset views.
Aleppo was the first big city we visited in Syria. The Citadel (which I was fortunate enough to visit at sunset) is pretty spectacular. It sits on a hill in the center of the city and is visible from almost anywhere. Usage of the Citadel hill dates back at least to the middle of the 3rd millennium BC but the current structure dates from the 13th century. And the added fun factor came from our hugely entertaining, slightly bizarre and definitely memorable local guide who was an extremely loud older gentleman (maybe half deaf, hence loud??) talking in a strong accent with great passion about the city history and the customs (at at some point mentioned something that I understood to be - but maybe it was his accent - penis perfume...).
Another amazing place in Aleppo is its main covered souq. All of the shopping your heart could possibly desire from gold and silver, boxes, clothing, fabric and soaps can be found here. I quickly found that many show owners spoke bits and pieces of Polish, which quickly led to funny conversations, including one of my fellow travellers trying to marry me off in exchance for some camels...
One of my personal favouite experiences of Aleppo - and of the whole of Syria to be fair - is the amazing sound of the calls to prayer, coming very loudly from every minaret in town (and there are quite a lot of them!) 5 times a day. It's fascinating and quite enchanting to listen to them - everything slows down for a bit, restaurant owners turn off their music and (what's different from calls to prayer in Iran) the mosques seem to be talking to each other: a call to prayer from one mosque is answered by a different "song" from another mosque. Around Syria I have listened to those mystic religious "performances" with up to 6 mosques getting involved in the "song"... Amazing... I got to truly love these sounds of Islam and it doesn't bother me that in some places, especially in the Syrian countryside, they come as early as 4:30 in the morning!
Damascus - also known as the "city of jasmin" is the capital of Syria and is the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. The old-walled city, in particular, feels very ancient and largely consists of a maze of narrow alleys, punctuated by enigmatic doors that lead into pleasing, verdant courtyards and blank-faced houses. The old city still has an authentic medieval feel to it, although this is vanishing very fast due to the increasing tourist traffic. One of my favourite places in the city - Souq al-Hamidiyya - is a broad (and crazily busy!!) street packed with tiny shops and is entered through columns from a Roman temple built on a site that had been occupied by an even older temple. The smells of spices, the screaming of the shop owners at each other and at potential customers, the music of calls to prayer, the noise of excited local children crowding the famous ice cream shops (slabs of ice cream rolled in pistacchio - yuuuum!) - it all creates a memorable atmosphere, which you just want to return to night after night. And it makes for some amazing people watching! At the end of Souq al-Hamidiyya stands the great Umayyad Mosque. It was an Assyrian temple, then a Roman temple to Jupiter, a church when Rome converted to Christianity, then a mosque and a church together, and finally a mosque until now. All the symbols are still pretty much there and some Christian drawings can still be very clearly seen on the walls inside. Damascus also has a Citadel (at the other end of the souq from the mosque) but it's not overly impressive if compared to the Aleppo Citadel and its crazy guide.
One of the truly unique experiences in Damascus is visiting the Al Nafura (The Fountain) Cafe after the sunset prayer for a sample of some Arabic storytelling called hakawati. It's evidently a dying art in Syria and it's passed from one generation to another to keep the tradition alive. It's quite a view to see the storyteller (the hakawati) clad in flowing Arab dress and a white skullcap seated on an elevated chair and, surveying the people below, reading / acting the stories from his book. Every now and then he would point his walking stick at someone in the audience and ask them to repeat certain phrases (which if you don't speak Arabic can be quite entertaining for the locals and for the storyteller). It's all in Arabic so the exact meaning obviously escaped me that it truly was as if we were back in the Middle Ages when one of the most preferred types of entertainment in the Middle East were the storytellers with their tales of war, chivalry, love, oppressors, rogues, and romance.
Krak des Chevaliers - another amazing place we visited in Syria. Standing as high as 2300 feet above sea level this Castle of the Knights considered the greatest fortress in the world. With its command over the valley between Homs and Tripoli, and being a model of perfection of medieval fortification, this Castle was never besieged or taken by storm. Exploring the many rooms, kitchens, towers, dungeons (including a challenge our guide gave us to find a secret passages under the castle) truly felt like an ideal hide-and-seek adventure for little boys. The history of this magnificent fortress is not very well known, it was given to a Kurdish garrison by the Amir of Aleppo in 1031, taken over by the Count of Toulouse in 1099, then by the Latin prince Tancred in 1110, and then by the Hospitallers in 1142. After that the Krak was kept in the hands of the crusaders, although it was damaged by a couple of earthquakes, and was rebuilt in its final form in the 13th century. It only fell to the Mameluke Sultan Baibars who resorted to a trick, in which he forged a letter supposedly from the Crusader commander in Tripoli that said that they should surrender, and so the greatest fortress in the world fell.
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