A country too dangerous to visit is one I can’t wait to return to

Most nights that Damascene spring of 2010, we dined outdoors at al-Naranj on oceanic servings of Syrian cuisine beneath a soft desert sky dusted with stars.

I’d travelled overland from Jordan on a small-group tour during a brief – tragically brief – thaw in relations with the West. The still air on the restaurant’s rooftop terrace was scented with tobacco from the shishas bubbling away soothingly from the smokers’ tables. Below us ran the famous “straight street” where St Paul was converted. Across the street vaulted a Roman triple arch of luminous pale stone, and from the arch rose a minaret. The arch carried the Arabic name of Bab Sharqi, or East Gate; to the Romans it was rather more poetically The Gate of the Sun.

Umayyad Mosque at sunset – a Christian basilica in a previous life, a Roman temple to Jupiter before that.Credit: iStock

For an incurable antiquarian and aspiring epicurean, the old town of Damascus was a kind of paradise. Seated around us at al-Naranj were a few Western tourists in their tees and cargo pants, though most of the tables were taken by bougie locals in high spirits dressed in their best. The women modestly though gorgeously attired, unsparing with their maquillage.

Damascus was surprising, delightful, and, in retrospect, dreadfully sad. With each new twist in Syria’s tragedy – the popular uprising a year later, its violent suppression, the destruction of Aleppo, and the rise and rampage of ISIS – those sweet memories began to curdle and sour. In time, the mere mention of Syria brought on a kind of sickness of soul. I fretted for the fate of the wonders I’d seen and the Syrians I’d met along the way.

The moment news broke of Assad’s fall and flight to Moscow, I went searching for news of al-Naranj. I’d already done my mourning for Palmyra – an oasis of palms, as its name suggests, and at its height in the first century, a splendid caravan city and market for silks and spices. There was also the lesser-known, more remote, but equally wondrous Hellenistic colonnade of Apamea. I’d seen both in 2010 before the ancient ruins were reduced to an even more ruinous state. But a restaurant is a kind of ecosystem and a marker of living culture. Of the obstinate pursuit of pleasure and company, of pleasure in company. Of hope.

Al-Naranj, I quickly learned, was still standing, still serving kababs layered with eggplants, kibbeh with pomegranate molasses, oven-baked cheese pies, and the best fattoush. So, too, was Bab Sharqi, the second-century Roman arch.

Fingers and toes crossed that beaten-down Syria will become again what it has always been (even if it has once again fallen into violence in recent days) – a great centre of civilisation, or at least a living memento of past greatness. And a place of rare and unexpected pleasures.

On my first night in Damascus I lost my goatee to a blade-wielding barber and walked out with fresh cheeks, as clean a jawline as age would allow, and a bracing, slightly spicy scent. Man fragrance isn’t really my thing, but as it had been applied by a chap holding a knife to my throat, it would have been foolish to resist.

I hurried through the streets to catch the evening performance at al-Nofra, a 300-year-old corner cafe on a street of ancient stones. From a wood-panelled room, I enjoyed shisha and tea while a bard with a salt-and-pepper moustache and a crimson fez intoned passages from the Thousand and One Nights, twirling a slender baton like a fencer with a foil. As the performance was in Arabic, he could have been reading the evening news for all I knew.

And yet ripples of laughter from the rapt local audience told me this was the real deal: it’s a universal though rarely acknowledged truth that the news is no laughing matter.

The next day, we descended on the richly decorated eighth-century Umayyad Mosque: a Christian basilica in a previous life, a Roman temple to Jupiter before that. Somewhat disconcertingly, the women in our tour group were compelled once inside the mosque to don pale blue hooded robes as revealing as space suits; there was an entire wardrobe department dedicated to feminine concealment.

Equally unsettling was the map of the Middle East in the national museum, with Israel studiously excised. And yet – here’s the cheering thing – one of the splendours of the museum’s collection was a third-century synagogue, or at least a to-scale reconstruction fitted with frescoes from the original. The frescoes were recovered from an ancient settlement called Dura-Europos perched high above the Euphrates River east of Damascus along the Iraqi border.

Back in the 1920s, the desert sands yielded the remains of something beautiful out in these borderlands: a late-antique multicultural civilisation, a mash-up of Judaism, Christianity and Paganism. One look at the dead city on its barren plateau and the cliche “godforsaken” springs to mind, and yet Dura-Europos, in its pomp, was anything but. The gods had converged on this desert way station. Most of the Dura-Europos synagogue frescoes, radiant with naive charm and poetic enchantment, tell Old Testament stories.

There’s the parting of the Red Sea replete with God’s wonder-working hands; Samuel anointing David; the rescue of the infant Moses from the Nile by Pharaoh’s daughter, who wades into the river completely starkers. Her unashamed nudity strikes a curious note in a land of the hijab and the niqab.

The archaeological site of Dura-Europos, before the civil war.Credit: Alamy

The characters in these beautifully preserved third-century frescoes gaze straight ahead with mystical, outsized eyes that look to have witnessed wonders. Not long after I saw the frescoes in Damascus, the archaeological site of Dura-Europos – their source, their origin – was trashed. ISIS led the charge. Looters feeding the international antiquities market soon followed.

I think of Dura-Europos as an inversion of Shelley’s famous sonnet to lost time in which a traveller to the desert encounters a bust of the great king Ozymandias – “half sunk, a shattered visage” – and an inscription proclaiming his worldly magnificence to the “lone and level sands”. But the emperor, historically speaking, has lost his clothes – as no trace but this fragment has been preserved, it’s as if he never existed.

No grand monuments survive from Dura-Europos, but the vibrant record of mixed faith speaks to us. The Jewish synagogue and the Christian house church are barely 200 metres from one another; sprinkled about the town are shrines to Persian deities such as Mithras and the Greek gods Zeus, Adonis and Artemis.

Unlike Ozymandias, consigned to oblivion, the message from Dura-Europos is blazingly relevant to a country whose best version of itself lies in some form of religious and cultural pluralism. A visitor to Dura-Europos in the third century, shortly before its fall to the Persians, would have walked into a Star Wars bar of religious and cultural diversity: a Roman legion bolstered by Palmyran archers defending a town where business was done in Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Middle Persian, Parthian, proto-Arabic and Hebrew.

Damascus, first settled in the third millennium BC, is an improbably rich layer cake of civilisation. “She measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires she has seen rise and prosper and crumble into ruin,” observed Mark Twain after a tour of the Levant in 1867.

“She is a type of immortality. She saw the foundations of Baalbek and Thebes and Ephesus laid; she saw these villages grow into mighty cities and amaze the world with their grandeur – and she has lived to see them desolate, deserted, and given over to the owls and the bats. She saw the Israelitish empire exalted, and she saw it annihilated. She saw Greece rise and flourish two thousand years and die … Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on earth, and still, she lives.”

She does, indeed. Though it was a close-run thing.

If the seemingly moderate rebel leader Ahmed al-Sharaa’s blitzkrieg hadn’t caught Assad and his Kremlin bosses napping, the country might have torn itself apart.

Looking at Syria through the fish-eye of her immense history – Twain thought she had a better claim than Rome to the title Eternal City – I find myself searching for grandiloquent metaphors of resurrection and rebirth. She is the Phoenix risen from the Ashes. But a saltier metaphor seems more appropriate. Let’s just say she’s got out of the jail into which she’d been plunged.

As Syria navigates a path of its own in one of the world’s most volatile regions, it could do worse than look for inspiration to the “lone and level sands” of Dura-Europos: a mash-up of pagans, Christians and Jews, a mingling, a blending; a chorus of different voices; a community united not by one belief but a tolerance for many.

For the moment, the country is too volatile to visit. But there will be a time. When it comes, I hope to book a table at al-Naranj with a view of the Roman arch and reflect – apologies to W.B. Yeats – on what is past, or passing, or to come.

See smartraveller.com.au

Luke Slattery is the author of Reclaiming Epicurus (Penguin), Dating Aphrodite (ABC Books) and Mrs M (Fourth Estate). He is working on a book about the Italian Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola. See lukeslatteryauthor.com