Will they know it's Christmas?

Syria was a country that defied stereotypes and now the deposed dictator lives among empty vodka bottles in freezing Moscow, writes SUR columnist Troy Nahumko

Troy Nahumko

Malaga

Friday, 20 December 2024, 17:09

It took place just down a covered corridor that was sporadically lit by what seemed like bullet holes in the tin roof. In my memory, ... it was perhaps the scene that most represented Christmas. By that I don't mean the conical medieval torture device by day and notional Christmas tree at night that vitiate each and every main square across the peninsula. Nor do I mean the anodyne motifs that line every street in the country that so ineffectually attempt to put a secular face on these generous annual donations from our municipal coffers to the Ebenezers of Iberdrola.

Here, where the chiaroscuro lane met the wide square, layers of history rose up in front of you like a millefeuille pastry. At ground level, the remains of an ancient Aramaean temple to Hadad-Ramman could be deciphered in the walled courtyard. From there, a series of Roman pillars supported a colonnade leading to a semi-ruined entranceway that the Romans had built after they assimilated Hadad with their own deity of thunder, Jupiter. And there in the centre of the square stood the Byzantine remains of an enormous church that had been dedicated to John the Baptist until the Caliph al-Walid I converted it into a temple that is still known as the Umayyad Mosque.

In the transitions you could palpably envision ancient Semitic rites being adopted into the Roman solstice of Saturnalia. In the air hung memories of the smell of the acrid papyrus smoke from the fundamentalist Christian bonfires as they consciously turned their backs on the accumulated knowledge of the classical world by implementing their dark, fatalistic vision of monotheism and thus monothought.

Then came the subsequent version of zealous believers, equally convinced that their new prophet was the sole interpreter of their celestial dictator's whims, even if their coat of whitewash left the Christian murals in the church, disfigured but visible. All this at the gates of a market that displayed all the tenets of the rampant consumerism that Christmas now entails.

I was ordering a pistachio ice cream, just steps away from where Saul of Tarsus fell off his horse, when I realised that the seller wasn't just giving me the ice cream but was just about to give me his phone number. Here I was in an Islamic country and I was being openly hit on by another man.

But this was a country that defied stereotypes. Just a few blocks away, while music rang out from shops in the Armenian neighborhood, I had seen more exposed flesh than you would in Ibiza. The Assad regime would drop barrel bombs and wipe out entire neighborhoods if you were against them, but under Bashar's rule there was a razor thin veneer of stability. Like Saddam and Muammar before him, he was the only deity the people had to fear and obey.

Now the deposed dictator lives among empty vodka bottles in freezing Moscow as Russia's Mediterranean colony takes on a distinct Turkish flavour under the expansionist and increasingly Islamist Erdogan. The big question now is, will you be able to say Merry Christmas here next year?

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