Day 35 Dead Cities
SYNOPSIS: I hired a driver to cover some ground around the SW area of Aleppo. I visited three important archaeological sites and a mosaic museum.DEAD CITIES, EXCAVATED MUD WALLS, OLIVE TREES AND SHEEPI should have called Ali, the young guy who took Ian and me around NW of Aleppo. We had told him what we wanted to see and not only did he know perfectly well where to go, he suggested at least two if not three extra sites along the way and got us there and back without problems. I made the mistake of asking the GTZ driver if he would take me around. I felt I owed him the loyalty and the business, but I deeply regret it! He was clueless. One of the sites I wanted to see he had never heard of – the quite famous mosaic museum. The other, listed as especially important on my map - he could not find. And finally, I wanted him to take me to the bee-hive village near Aleppo and he claimed he did not know anything about such a village. He asked me where to go – just picture that! We had to rely on a very rough map that I had gotten from the tourist office and thank goodness, had brought along. And then we got lost and had to backtrack a few times. Oh, brother! And after all that he charged as much as Ali would have. Oh, if I could just turn the clock back! But OK – this will go into history as a bad day, but I still saw a few things. Just to round things up, we had a few downpours, including hail, to create the perfect backdrop for the scenario. But with a private car I could at least stay inside when needed and did not have to get soaking wet – my memories of that in Lebanon are not so fond.On the program were some of the dead cities that are famous around here. I got to see at least the two most important ones. It is still a mystery how these cities came about in the first place. People built them to last – and they succeeded as the remnants prove – but around the 8th century, they left and moved elsewhere, why? Today, in the case of Serjila, there is grass all over the site and fields around. A guy plowed a small plot with two horses right next to the ruins and a shepherd ran his flock through the site. In the case of Al Bara, the old town is huge and spread out over several small hills. Between the houses hundreds of olive trees have been planted that are still the backbone of the local economy – olive trees are worth gold. That means the ruins are not as accessible, but they exist side by side with the locals and their needs. These are dead cities, but given the sheep and the olive trees and in some cases, locals making storage rooms out of them, they are not as dead as one might think. Usually, I cringe when I see that locals will use precious ancient remains for contemporary needs. The worst case and the most typical is garbage disposal – but in this case it makes sense. These ruins are unique to Syria and to a visitor. But there are 600-800 of these sites around here, large and small. It is impossible to give preference to the past over the present in all of them and a happy medium seems to have been found.We stopped at a town called Al Ma’ara which houses one of the most extensive mosaic collections of Syria. Many of the mosaics were taken from exactly these dead cities. Some are of enormous dimensions – they must have embellished the floors of the wealthy in local mansions. What makes this collection so wonderful is that it is housed in the largest Khan of Syria. The building itself is as much worth a trip as the collection of mosaics themselves. Hunting scenes and geometric motifs seem to be in the majority, but there was one very Roman looking motif that seems to have depicted Greco-Roman mythology. The guard who followed me on my heels, graciously allowed me to take one photograph. All the other pictures I have, I had to take behind his back…And finally, we stopped in Ebla. I am so grateful that there are archaeologists out there who are having as much fun digging in the ground as I have talking about what they dig up. I could not make heads or tails out of all the knee-high walls and fragments. Supposedly, there was a mighty Sumerian kingdom there and this was their palace. You have to have a lot of imagination. What impressed me is that a huge library of 15000 cuneiform tablets was found there. The site museum was closed – what a shame, but I hear it is awful anyhow… I would have enjoyed a bit more background on all this as could not conjure up the full pictures by just looking at a few mud bricks and rocks. But if fit into the tenor of the day, that the driver was clueless, the weather, shaky, and the museum closed. You got to take what you can get. And at times it isn’t what you paid for.Good night.