Trip to Syria, May 2008

There are links in the text to sets of photos of the various places we visited.

Sunday 18th May, Cambridge, 2.15am

After two hours sleep got up, dressed, and hardly had we done so when the taxi arrived, five minutes earlier than requested. Arrived at the bus rank on the edge of Parker's Piece with twenty five minutes to wait in the cold. However, after five minutes the previous bus arrived, a quarter of an hour late, so we got on that and set off for Heathrow via Stansted airport. Of course we got to Heathrow rather earlier than planned, but at least we were there, and we sat around for a couple of hours till seven when the check-in opened.

Eventually 10am came and the plane took off. It was some sort of Airbus, not very big, with a central aisle and three seats on either side. Airbuses are always more comfortable than Boeings in my experience, and I was given a window seat behind the wings so spent much of the trip indulging in one of my favourite pastimes, staring out of the windows of planes. Sadly, on this trip Syrian airways didn't show our flightpath on a screen, but I did manage to work out what we were passing when we crossed the northern tip of Cyprus. As we came in to land I was puzzled by what looked like small red gas cylinders on the roofs of all the houses. These turned out later to be water tanks, somewhat bigger that I had thought.

Damascus airport is smallish and as the party were on a group passport it didn't take too long to be let into the country, find our baggage, and change some money. Syria doesn't allow the export of its currency, so you have to get it once you arrive. The currency is Syrian Pounds, divided in theory into 100 piastres per pound, but as the pound sterling is worth roughly 90 SP, there aren't in practice any coins smaller than SP 5. As a quick rule of thumb we treated one SP as one penny and just divided every sum by 100 and called the answer pounds sterling.

We were driven by coach to a hotel somewhere in the suburbs of Damascus for a stay of three nights. It wasn't very exciting, and the shower was abyssmal, but then around 98% of all the showers in all the hotels in the world don't work properly as far as I have experienced.

Monday 19 May. Damascus - National Museum, Christian Quarter, Great Ummayad Mosque

Next morning it was into the coach which was to ferry us throughout the trip and off to the National Museum. The coach didn't inspire much confidence - there were two long cracks in the windscreen which almost met in the middle, and a pebble hole between them. Some of the shorter passengers didn't find the backs of the seats comfortable, but it was fine for me. Our driver had a fridge of cold bottled water behind him, which you could buy off him whenever we stopped. (An oddity of Syria turned out to be that the bottled water is all still. No such thing as fizzy water, which lots of us could have done with.) The coach could have done with a better public address system - it wasn't always easy to hear the guide - and a loo would have been useful, but it got us round hundred of miles with only some slight problems on the last day.

The guide, as we set off from the hotel, tried to address us. As the chattering passengers started to quieten one voice did not. A woman was haranguing her husband, loudly and bitterly, and she continued to do so, not realising for the best part of a minute that her's was the only voice. We all sat embarrassed till she tailed off. Actually we turned out to be with a really nice group of twenty travellers, married, single, old, middle-aged, gay, American - quite a cross-section of the world - and everyone got on very well.

The first part of the morning was spent in the museum, undergoing a crash course in the history of Syria while seeing exhibits from many periods and places. Sadly, museums don't let you take photos, which makes it harder to remember afterwards what you have seen, but it was a good intro to the country. Of course many exhibits are in museums in foreign countries, and some only survive as copies in Syria of things destroyed in wars in Europe.

The highlight for me was the reconstruction of the synagogue of Doura Europos, a trading city on the Euphrates, which runs through the eastern section of the country. Forget everything they ever told you about Jews not allowing depictions of the human form. My guess is that the room is about 40 feet wide, and 20 high and deep. It is absolutely covered in frescoes of Old Testament scenes in bright colours and a style which reminds me of Ethiopian Christian art. When the town was sacked by the Sassanids in the mid third century BC the synagogue was filled with sand somehow, and that preserved the vibrant colours until it was rediscovered in 1932. It is breathtaking.

Syria has a complicated history, being in that much fought-over buffer zone between Egypt in the south and various kingdoms in the north. The Hittites, Assyrians and Persians were there, as were the Canaanites. Alexander conquered it and after his death it was part of the Seleucid Empire. Then the Romans ruled, latterly from Byzantium, till Muslim armies invaded from Arabia in the 600sAD. Bits of the land were briefly crusader states, then Arab again, before the land became part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire from 1516 till the end of the First World War. There was a brief attempt at independence, but the Great Powers weren't having that, and gave France a mandate which lasted till 1946. During their time the French did a lot of good archaelogical work, but they also hived off that part of the country which is now the separate state called Lebanon to appease their particular favourites the Maronite Christians. It is no wonder that the Syrians tend to rather interfere in Lebanon, which is historically part of the same territory. The French also gave the northern Mediterranean coastal provinces away, to Turkey, to encourage that country not to side with the the Germans in any future war.

After the museum we were bussed round to the Eastern Gate of the old city, the Bab Sharqi at one end of the biblical Street called Straight. It should now be called The Street Which Is Being Repaved And If You Aren't Careful You Could Fall In A Very Deep Hole. From here it was a short walk through the narrow streets of the Christian quarter to the Chapel of St Ananias. For those who have forgotten their bible he was the chap who healed St Paul's blindness. The chapel is just a pair of vaulted underground rooms with no feelingof holiness at all. It is run by RC Franciscans, though none were in evidence. Sadly, it was the one church on our whole trip which did nothing for me. Could it be because all the rest were Greek Orthodox? I really don't usually have a problem with Roman Catholic in England or France, so maybe it was must me that day and it wasn't really as tawdry as I am making out.

Lunch in the courtyard of a house converted to a restaurant was followed by an interesting afternoon. We made our way through the streets of old Damascus to the Putting on Special Clothes Room. At least that's what our guide book says it is called, I didn't have to put the clothes on and so didn't go up to it. Incidentally, more about the dreadful guide book, for which I had paid good money to Amazon, at the end of the blog. The special clothes were a hooded long brown cloak for the ladies of the party so as to make them fit for going in a mosque, though we didn't go into the mosque yet, as there was Saladin's tomb(s) to visit. He has one wooden one and one marble, the latter provided by a crawling Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1898 to suck up to the Ottomans. The round (or octagonal perhaps) building they are housed in is about the size of the Arian Baptistry in Ravenna, all white and blue tiles inside, and quite moving.

Then the Great Ummayad mosque. I won't bore you with the historical details except to say that an enormous pagan temple of the 9th C BC to Hadad became first a Temple to Jupiter under the Romans and then the Cathedral of St John the Baptist under the Christians. When the Muslims took over they shared it with the Christians for a hundred years before they effectively bought them out and largely rebuilt it, using Byzantine mosaicists amongst 12000 workman.

I had never been in a mosque before, except perhaps little ex-mosques in Rhodes. The courtyard is vast, mosaiced, and impressive. The mosque itself is only marginally smaller, and completely carpeted. A third is roped off for women and children though they are allowed into the rest of the building too, it is just that men are kept out of the women's bit. People walked around, slept, picnicked. Down one side a preacher at a desk haranged a large group of young men in their twenties, sitting on the carpet around him. He was amplified all over the mosque and the courtyard, so you couldn't get away from him. Two thirds of the way up the building there is a green windowed freestanding edifice within it, containing it is said, the head of John the Baptist. There was a good feel to the whole mosque, even if carrying my shoes around was bit of a nuisance.

Then we went around the main souk and were shown behind the scenes at a shop where a Jaquard loom was being used to make silk damasque cloth. We could not resist the resultant colours and spent heavily! The souk here is wide and high. Not very romantic apart from the bullet holes in the roof left over from some revolution. But then we hadn't at this stage seen the side streets, or indeed Aleppo.

At supper in an old house (palace more like) in the old city we were treated to a tame Whirling Dervish. A bit of a shame that a religious rite should become a tourist attraction.

Tuesday 20 May. From Damascus to Bosra

We took the coach south towards the Jordanian border. With four million inhabitants Damascus stretches a long way. What was noticeable on the sides of the road in places were huge areas covered in small piles of rubble. It was if lorry loads of building detritus had been carefully dumped in a very regular grid plan. Perhaps they had. Also on the sides of the road we saw our first Bedouin encampments. Usually there were two, three, up to six, tents and somewhere in the vicinity a few people looking after a small herd of goats. There was sometimes a satellite dish, as tall as the tent, resting on the ground. So there must be electricity. Perhaps one of the tents was dedicated to holding a small generator. There were no dogs. It was days before I saw my first in Syria, and the whole time we can't have seen more than a couple of dozen. What a wonderful country it is (says one who fell off his bike last week attempting to avoid the attack of one of the brutes).

As we drove south, looking right towards the west we could see on the horizon the Golan Heights, part of Syria occupied by the Israelis since 1967. And we passed over another bit of history, the railway line that T E Lawrence used to blow up on his days off.

Our first call was a large village called Ezraa, around 80k south of Damascus. Driving through it the immediate impression one got was that not a single house had been completed. All had an upper flat storey with reinforced concrete pillars sticking out of the top. The reason is, says the guide, that Syrian families are very family orientated, and as each generation grows up and marries a new storey is added to the home.

The other thing that intrigued me, though I didn't find out the answer for some days, was that some of the houses sported a painting or stencil of what was obviously the Ka'aba in Mecca on their walls. The reason for this, I learnt, was that that is what you do to show you have done the pilgrimage to Mecca. It is a rather nice idea. We should take it up. Those of us who have been to Rome could paint a picture of St Peter's next to our front door and perhaps devote Methodists who have made the pilgrimage could have Wesley's Chapel on their wall.

At the far end of the village we came upon what looked like a small square black (all the stone round here is volcanic basalt) fort with a dome (and if you went round the back an apse sticking out). This was the church of St George, where he is buried. There's an inscription outside which dates its use as a church as going back to 515, and another which says it was converted from being a pagan temple. I reckon it was a little fort before that. It just has that look. Inside the church has been made into an octagonal by building arches across the corners. Altogether a pleasing building.

Then on another 50k to Bosra, even further south. Bosra has lots of claims to fame. There are extensive ruins. It was there in the Bronze Age, the Egyptians knew it, the Seleucids held it. The Nabateans moved there capital there from Petra at one stage. Under Trajan 5000 troops were stationed there, which is why the most important reason for Bosra's present fame exists, the theatre. A World Heritage Site, it is considered to be the most perfectly preserved Roman theatre in the world. And it is a stunner. It is so intact because the middle got filled with windblown sand, and the outside was encased in the walls of an Ayyubid fortress of the 13th century.

Its a gem, but you can also see the remains of a church were Muhammed, in his trading days and before writing the Quran got advice on religion from a Christian monk, the ruins of a cathedral which was the model for the first version of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople (it fell down) and one of the oldest mosques in the world.

Until the French came along and persuaded everyone to leave most of the archaeological sites in Syria were inhabited. Traces of their homes still exist amongst the columns in Bosra, and the new town still slightly overlaps the old. We were taken to a cool courtyard garden for lunch. Not sophisticated and formal like one of the houses in Damascus, but sloping, irregular, and with various hovel-like rooms off the sides, including our first Syrian loos. Holes in the ground may be a good thing from a physiological point of view, but I was glad I was not a woman. I could not have coped with the squatting.

It was a late lunch as we'd spent a long time site-seeing, but when it came to setting off it transpired that our quarrelling couple of the day before had taken themselves off and got lost. The guide went in one direction and the coach in another, and eventually they were found. They said they were sorry, and to give them their due they didn't do it again.

Once back in Damascus we were taken up Mount Qassioun to see the view of the city. It was cool up there and is a favourite place for Damascenes when the summer heat comes. It was over 30 degrees every day we were there, and come June and July is so hot that the tour company don't even bother to run trips to Syria.

Mention of Mt Qassioun reminds me of the problems of travel and transliteration in Syria, and I suppose all Arab speaking lands. Transliterations into Roman script of place names can vary wildly on roadsigns even within a few yards of each other. What we call Homs is often written as Hims, and so it goes. And according to the guide book it is usually the case that though road signs in the countryside are usually in Arabic and Roman script, those in the towns are usually only in the former, which makes it hell for foreign drivers trying to find the right road out of town. With our propensity for getting lost (see blog of Sicily last year) I was glad we were on a guided tour and I didn't have to worry.

Wednesday 21 May - To Palmyra

Up very early to get to Palmyra (or Tadmur or Tadmor as they call it), 250k northeast of Damascus. Palmyra is an oasis in what I would call desert, but they call steppe (bedu in Arabic, hence Bedouin for dwellers on the steppe). We drove through this desolate but quite gentle country, undulating with the occasional range of hills to pass. Not sandy, but with a sort of grey brown stone surface. Sometimes sparse vegetation. There should have been more, and there should have been Bedouin with their flocks, but apparently the rains failed last winter so the nomads have had to keep their flocks nearer the coast where they wintered. We did pass a herd of a hundred or so camels some way before a crossroads which signed Palmyra straight on, and Baghdad right.

The ruins of Palmyra, next to the palms of the oasis, are quite spectacular, though somewhat diluted for the first few minutes by the small horde of souvenir sellers who descend on you when you get out of your coach. Having failed to sell you anything they get on their motorbikes, and while you walk up the column-lined street they wizz off through the ruins and ambush you two hundred yards further on, greeting you as if you had never seen them or their table cloths before. But you have, and they ride off again to meet you further on again. If you are lucky another coach arrives at the start and they buzz off to try it on the newcomers. They weren't really a problem, and people never were actually.

Here we saw for the first time something that isn't quite peculiar to this site as we saw more of the same at Apamea, but which I haven't seen in any other classical ruins. Many of the pillars down the side of the main street had little plinths protruding out into the street, some 3 or 4 metres above the ground. These were for the local worthies to place statues of themselves on.

It was really hot that day and there's little shelter on the site, but lunch was in an airconditioned 6th floor restaurant of one of several hotels that abutt the site. There's a Valley of the Tombs, which come in two sorts, underground and overground. The overground ones are towers of about four stories. Each floor has a central chamber with floor to ceiling niches either side. The deceased was placed on the shelf of a niche and the end sealed with a decorated plaque. Room for three hundred occupants.

The underground tombs (called hypogeums, which I suppose just means underground) had a grand staircase going down to a big door behind which was a chamber for the inevitable feasting, and again, niches for the bodies. The one we were taken to see had been a family tomb, but financial constraints had meant that the owners were forced to take paying guests.

The biggest part of the site is the Temple of Bel (or Baal). Quite impressive. Of course in later times it became a Byzantine church and then a mosque until the French moved everyone out in 1929.

I don't suppose we did real justice to Palmyra - apparently the best time to be there is early morning and in the evening as the sun goes down - but it is quite a place whenever you see it. Our final act was to be taken in the coach up to the Arab fortress which tends to be in the background of any photos of the place, and look down with almost an aeroplane's eye view on the site.

We then had a long 210k drive west towards to coast. I began to notice for the first time that there was a lot of rubbish - plastic bags and the like - at the sides of the road. At first I thought, well what about England? When you go along our main roads in the winter when the trees are bare you see that in every bush, and under every bush, there are millions of plastic bags. That is true, but in the end I realised that Syria is even worse than we are. There really is the most awful lot of rubbish just dumped or left to blow. A pity.

At first our drive from Palmyra was all desert, but as we went west towards Homs the vegetation changed in that there were now some trees and plantations of almonds. After Homs be began plunging down towards the coast, and the vegetation became lush and Mediterranean, and we were passing through a coastal mountain range, with Lebanon in site on our left (south). The border comes within a few kilometres of the road here. Halfway down the road to the coast we turned north into the mountains through a series of almost interconnecting villages, all looking prosperous and 90%, the guide told us, Christian.

This is perhaps the moment to say something about our guide, Samir. He never told us his surname. Of Syrian Greek Orthodox background from Aleppo, he lives most of his year in New Zealand with his British wife. Highly educated, trained as an archaeologist, proficient in various languages, good humoured, patient, he was the best guide one could have had on such a trip. He took everything in his stride, from hotel rooms to questions about the Hittites. The only time I saw him at all moved to emotion was when I rather provocatively asked him whether the Arabic speaking nations would every consider doing what the Turks did and move from using Arabic script to Latin. (There would be advantages, like having vowel sounds indicated in the written language.). He positively roared his NO in response to my question. A bad guide could ruin a trip like this. Samir made it wonderful.

Our destination that evening was our hotel for the next two nights, a monstrosity on the top of a mountain with view of the mountains of Lebanon in the background and Krac des Chevalliers on its own hill four or five miles away.



Thursday 22 May - Saladin's Castle, Ugarit

Despite having spent the night within sight of Krac we didn't go there today. Instead we drove to the coast and made our way north 130k to Saladin's Castle, 40k inland from Syria's northern port, Lattakia. It was a Byzantine fortress, taken over in 1108 by a French family called De Saone, and kept till Saladin and his son took it in 1188. The Arabic name was always Sahyoun, but it was renamed Saladin's Castle in 1957, presumably in an attempt to make it more romantic or popular.

It was the biggest in area of all the Crusader castles. Built on a wooded spur, with ravines on either side, its only weak point was where the spur joined the mountain behind. To cancel this weakness an enormous gulley was cut, probably the the Byzantine builders of the castle, right across the spur, 28m deep and 15m wide. They just left a pinnacle at one end to support a drawbridge to the "mainland".

The road through the ravine is so narrow and hairpinned that we were transferred from our coach into minibuses, which drive into the gulley from where a ramp leads up to the castle. It is a good wild place, heavily wooded and not much reconstructed, full of wild flowers. But hot, very hot.

Then down to the coast just north of Lattakia before a short drive to Ugarit or Ras Shamra, famous for being the place where the first alphabet was discovered in tablets in the extensive palace archives. The site only came to light in 1928 and was excavated by the French, who took all the best finds to the Louvre. Now it is a few kilometres from the sea; in its heyday in the 2nd millenium BC it was an independent Canaanite coastal city state with trading links all over the Mediterranean. When the Sea Peoples (the Philistines) arrived c.1200BC it went into a decline.

There isn't a lot to see apart from jumbles of stone amongst the vegetation, but there are signs in the floors of the sophisticated plumbing systems. The oddest touch is the family tombs, which were placed under the floors of the houses. They are like a smaller version of the much later hypogeae of Palmyra, with a stone staircase leading down to a vaulted chamber around 8 foot long and 6 high. The bodies were presumably stacked on the floor or on some sort of wooden shelving as the only feature of any sort left is small niches, possibly for lamps, in each wall.

Ugarit seen, it was back in the coach for the long ride back south to our hotel near Krac. Unfortunately that night Rosalind was hit by a stomach bug and did not get much sleep.

Friday 23rd May. Monastery of St George, Krak des Chevaliers, Hama, Apamea, Aleppo

Quite a day this, with an early start. It was just three miles or so to the Monastery of St George which has been going for some time. Off one side of the courtyard is the New Church of 1857. At a lower level, but at the other side of the courtyard is a smaller 13th century church. Both these were remarkable in having two fonts, one old and one new, all properly plumbed in with hot and cold running water. English fonts could do with the same. Even lower is the 6th century church, but this is just a bare vaulted room, much like a bigger version of the Ugarit house tombs of the previous day.

Then on to Krak des Chevaliers. Looked at from one side this is an impressive solitary fortress standing on its rock. The approach is from the other side where a modern town goes right up to its walls. The inside is vast, built to accomodate 2000 knights. It rarely had that number, and when the Knights Hospitaller lost it to Sultan Baibars in 1271 after 160 years of Crusader occupation, there were only a few hundred knights in residence. Even then the castle wasn't taken by force but by trickery - the knights surrendered when they received a letter from allies in Tripoli saying no relieving force was going to be able to come. When they got to Tripoli under their safeconduct they discovered the letter was a forgery.

The place has a friendly feel. British castles (many modelled on this one) often have a grim and empty atmosphere. Maybe this sort of architecture is more fitted to the climate in the middle east than to our shores. Rooms that here were cool and pleasant in the hot Mediterranean midday are so often in Britain just dank and cold, even on summer days.

After Krac we went inland and then north, up to Hama, on the Damascus to Aleppo road and more or less halfway between them. The town is on the Orontes River, here running north looking for a gap in the coastal range of mountains. And herein lies its fame, its waterwheels. In the local museum we saw a sixth century mosaic of one just like these, though of course they wear out and what we saw were only three or four hundred years old. The river was too low (that drought again) for them to be going round, so we missed their famous groaning. Their purpose, I should explain, was to lift water out of the river into aqueducts which channelled it into the neighbouring fields. The seventeen or so that are left are superceded by electric pumps, just like the drainage windmills in East Anglia, but they remain as representative of the hundreds which once lined similar rivers all over the Middle East.

We didn't spend more than twenty minutes at the Hama waterwheels before going into the cool of the local museum. It is small but full of treasures, especially a huge fourth century Roman mosaic of a group of female musicians.

Then north again, but to the west of the Damascus - Aleppo main road, to visit Apamea. It is apparently Syria's largest classical site, but it doesn't have the appeal of Palmyra. What there is is a mile or so of the main street flanked by columns re-erected by Belgian archaeologists from the 1930s onwards.Basically, you walk down this street and that is it. It had a huge Roman theatre, now robbed out, and was famous for its fighting elephants, which it trained in a big way. Unfortunately for the elephants some kind of non-proliferation treaty in 162BC with the Romans led to their all being slaughtered. Most of the better finds were transferred to a Belgian museum which was totally destroyed in the Second World War.

Maybe our problem was that our visit there was on such a busy day in our itinerary and we didn't spend enough time to do the place justice.

Towards the end of the afternoon we got back on the road north and got to Aleppo in the early evening. The hotel was an old house (I'd have called it a small palace) in the old city to which you had to walk a few hundred yards as the coach couldn't drive there. We had a first floor room which looked out to the Citadel. In the foreground however was a wonderfully scruffy bit of ground which sported a large trailer full of plastic chairs, a cockerel, a crow, and two sheep. It was quite a big bit of land and we couldn't see all of it because of various trees, buildings etc, so the sheep weren't always visible. They appeared to be Siamese sheep in that they went round so close together that they seemed to be conjoined at the shoulder.

The hotel was lovely, and we dined on the roof with an even better view of the Citadel than from our room.

Saturday 24th May - Aleppo.

Next morning there was a tour of the said Citadel. It is built on a natural hill, so that far from being a man made tel the natural rock can be seen in a few places on the top. There is a mixture of Bronze Age, Byzantine, Ayyubid and Mameluk architecture, some still in the midst of excavation. Having got to the top by various gently ramped streets we came back down through private precipitate staircases in the Mameluke palace and found ourselves once again at the grand gateway.

We must have visited the Aleppo National Museum that morning as well, but I have absolutely no remembrance of it. What was a highlight was the visit to the souk, a much more exciting place than the one in Damascus, with narrow streets, interesting architecture, especially the khans, which appear to have been inns for merchants where their pack animals, themselves and their wares could rest safely overnight. There is a warren of streets, courtyards, lanes, in places vaguely themed, such as wedding dress sellers and butchers having their own areas. You can go in a few yards from skinned sheep's heads to jewellers' windows full of gold to carpet sellers. For once we wandered unguided, but safe from all but the occasional rushing pack donkey which, apart from the odd bicycle is the only way to move goods round the souk.

Sunday 25th May. St Simeon, Maaloula, Damascus

It was an early start on our last full day in Syria. We set off in a northwesterly direction from Aleppo to St Simeon. This turned out to be one of the highlights of the whole trip. The place is a lonely pine covered hillside around 25 miles from Aleppo and within sight of the mountains of Turkey. Here lived on an 18m (around 60 feet) pillar for the last thirty six years of his life Simeon Stylites, a hermit courted by the world, from royalty to beggars.

When he died in 459AD the emperor caused to be built a complex of four basilicas around the pillar. The eastern one was a cathedral, the others gathering places for the thousands of pilgrims who came for centuries to see the place and scrape a little off the holy pillar to be used as a holy potion and cure for every disease, mental or spiritual, known to man. Which is why all that remains of the pillar is a 2m high boulder.

And all around it is ruin. But what ruin. This must be one of the most beautiful and numinous religious sites in the world. I suppose it is something about cool pine-clad hillsides with ruins that rings a bell in us. I can remember the site of Epidaurus in Greece, the sanctuary of Asclepios, doing the same thing for me. But let the pictures speak for themselves.

It was midmorning when we set off south for Damascus, skirting Aleppo to the west. It was at this stage that it was announced that the hydraulic dampers of the coach were leaking and that we would need to stop somewhere for a top-up or repair or both - it wasn't clear. In fact we ended up stopping three times in obscure towns and villages. I am not sure the problem was ever cured, but in total not more than half an hour can have been added to the day's travelling, and though the driver may have had to take things a little easier we passengers were not affected at all.

However the delays meant that it was nearly 3pm when we arrived at our planned lunch stop in the village of Maaloula, 40 miles northwest of Damascus. The place is a scruffy little town nestled at the bottom of an escarpment. The lunch was nice, I have to say, and took place in a restaurant perched over a drop looking out over the plains, but the real purpose of our stop here was to visit the monastery of St Sergius and Bacchus at the top of the escarpment overlooking the town.

Now the claim to fame of Maaloula is that it is one of just three villages whose native language is still Aramaic, the native language of Jesus. The monastery has a fourth century church, with an altar which is supposed to predate Nicaea in that it is in a form which we are told was banned by that Council. The top of the altar is a flat marble rectangular slab, around 30 inches wide and four feet long. One of the shorter ends, nearest the congregation, is right angled, the other is rounded like an arch. The whole has a lip all the way round, so that the blood of the sacrifice did not run all over the place. In other words, this is a pagan altar in form, which is why the Council prohibited their use. How this one came to be retained is a mystery.

I would love to have been able to show pictures of this fascinating altar, and the wonderful church. However, the monastic authorities see fit to ban photography in their church. For me discovering that prohibition was the low point of our whole visit to Syria. I have complained before, in my remarks on some Romanian churches, of the stupidity of church authorities in doing this. You can understand banning photography in the past when film cameras always had to use flash inside buildings. That is annoying and distracting and the bright light can harm works of art. But these days digital cameras work as well or better without flash, so it would be easy and sensible to prohibit flash photography but allow people to photograph without flash.

It is also argued sometimes that photography should be banned so that visitors have to patronise the wares of the church shop. That would be all very well if what was sold was any good. The postcards the monastery of St Sergius and St Bacchus had of their historic altar were pathetic overexposed apologies of photographs which did it no justice. I, and I would have thought most tourists, would happily pay 50 Syrian Pounds (around £5 Sterling or US$10) for the privilege of taking photos. The visitors would be happy and the monastery would make some money. No-one would be inconvenienced. As I say, I was angry and disgusted at this petty ban.

Shaking the dust off our feet we left Maaloula and were taken to Damascus for a last night, this time in an hotel within walking distance of the old city.

So on our last day, the Monday, we had time to wander around the souk again before our flight home. This time there was a TV screen in the plane showing our flight path, but as it was cloudy all journey (and I was over a wing) it didn't help a lot. We arrived back at Heathrow to teeming rain - a typical English Bank Holiday.

At the end of it all I thoroughly recommend a Jules Verne Apostles to Crusaders holiday

The Guide Book.

I said I would have something to say about Syria, the Bradt Travel Guide by Diana Darke. We used the Bradt guide to Lille to great effect last year, so were tempted to buy this, especially since it was published more recently than either the Lonely Planet or the Rough Guide books.

In some ways this was a perfectly good tool for the job. It seems to cover all one would want covered. I particularly liked the Arabic proverbs which accompany each chapter heading - such advice as Trust in God, but tie your camel, and He who takes a donkey up a minaret must take it down again (though I am not sure what that one means), and It is better to endure the wind of a camel than the prayers of a fish.

Where the guide falls down is in the really bad editing. Neither the author nor the copy editor (if there was such a person) properly read the finished text, so that there are several places where various recensions of the text are just printed one after the other, like the P and Q sources in the book of Genesis, so that you get the same description twice in slightly different words. An example comes in the last paragraph on page 185, at the end of the section on Ugarit.

Look out near the two temples for a black basalt stone in a triangle shape with three holes, which was an anchor used for tying up ships. Ugarit's gigantic anchors were celebrated. They weighed up to half a tonne each, giving an idea of the size of the ocean-going vessels. There used to be lots of these stones, but most have now been stolen. The whole site has now been fenced to prevent theft which has become a bit of a problem. Look out for a black basalt stone in a triangle with three holes, which was an anchor used for tying up ships. There used to be lots of these stones, but most have now been stolen.

That repetition is annoying and unnecessary. There is another example three quarters of the way down page 229 where advice is given twice in two paragraphs about the necessity of arriving in Palmyra by sunset. There were others too, but I am not going to re-read the book just to find them.

Then there's the dodgy spelling. We are told on page 202 that there is a crenulated rampart walkway at Krak. The word is crenellated according to my Oxford dictionary. That's another one which is down to the editor.

However, the biggest howler in the book is the explanation given on page 263 of the meaning of the word Mesopotamia.

The name Mesopotamia is thought to be made up of a conglomerate of meanings in the Sumerian language : 'me' means female, 'so' means ancestors, 'po' means crops, 'ta' means fields and 'mia' means temples.

I don't think so. In Greek meso is between, and potamos is a river. Mesopotamia is the land between the rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates. Every schoolchild used to be taught that at an early age. I think we have to blame the author for that one, though a good editor would have picked it up.

NORTH YORKSHIRE

We spent last weekend in North Yorkshire, part of the world that I have hitherto only passed through on the A1. My father loved the Dales and now I can see why.

We arrived in Ripon late on the Friday afternoon and had time to see the cathedral. It is one of those (relatively) small northern cathedrals, more picturesque from the outside than inside. Though there is a crypt reputed to have been built by St Wilfred around 680AD. (It is apparently very similar to the one in Hexham Abbey which is definitely his.) The crypt was for relics, and of course there was a church over it, but that and several successors have been destroyed, so that now it is under a rather larger edifice than Wilfred could have imagined. Like Hexham's it is accessed by stairs and a narrow passageway. The chambers at the centre are not as large as most suburban bathrooms. Alas the relics are long since gone, so it is rather bare.

The only other feature of the cathedral that took our attention inside was carving on the choir stalls and their misericords. There is a griffin which might have come right out of Tenniel's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland. People have wondered if Lewis Carroll was influenced by the carvings. He certainly knew the place - his father was a canon there - but since he didn't do the illustrations for the book himself this seems doubtful.


As it happened the Bed and Breakfast establishment that the Tourist Bureau found for us was in a building which in the nineteenth century was a boarding school attended by Charles Dodgson (to give Carroll his real name) when he was a boy. We were told that Henry Liddell, the father of Alice Liddell, the child to whom Carroll first told the story of Alice in Wonderland, had also (before Dodgson) been a pupil at the school.




Ripon has a tradition going back to medieval times that every evening at 9 o'clock the Watchman blows his horn in the town square. Unfortunately it took rather long to pay our bill in the restaurant so we arrived in the square in time to hear the last blast but not soon enough to actually see the man.

Next morning we went to the market again for the Continental Market, a jolly affair. We bought three tins of cassoulet, one of my favourite stews from Provence (pork sausage, duck and haricot beans) from a stallholder from Normandy, and some Sicilian cakes. Delicious.





Then it was off to Skelton-cum-Newby, a village three miles away, to see the church of Christ the Consoler. In around 1870 the son of local gentry was part of a party ambushed by brigands between Athens and Marathon. The kidnappers first demanded 50 000 pounds as ransom, which was collected, but then they decided that what they really wanted was an amnesty from the Greek government for their previous crimes. That wasn't forthcoming, so they killed the hostages, including young Frederick Vyner.


The family had this church designed and built by William Burges at enormous expense to remember him by. It is set in a field on the edge of the family estate, is very beautiful, and redundant in every sense of the word.






Then we visited Newby Hall itself. It has Adam interiors and Chippendale furniture and gardens going down to the River Ure along which there runs a miniature train line for the amusement of the children. The house and gardens were used in a recent production of Mansfield Park. Not sure if I saw that one. There's been a bit of a Jane Austen glut recently. The place was well worth visiting. Highlights - the gardens, the chamber pot museum and the views of the Ure Valley from the upstairs windows.



The day was bitter, but was clear. After lunch we drove north up the Ure Valley, stopping at random. Masham church proved to be quite ordinary apart from one window of St George. The dragon looks almost puppyish, like a Pekinese (or is it now called a Beijingese?) dog.




Then there came Middleham, a small village with the ruins of a large castle. Here Richard III grew up under the eye of Warwick the Kingmaker, who was big in these parts. Alas, since the Civil War of the 17th century when it was ordered to be slighted it has not been lived in since.














Wensley, the village after which the dale is named, has one of the most depressing churchyards we've ever seen. It is completely let over to rabbits, which brazenly cavorted in front of us. The ground is all humps and bumps like a warren, and several gravestones lie flat on their faces. Once can only hope the rabbits that undermined them got squashed underneath when they fell.

Inside the church is the most enormous curtained double family pew. Legend has it - and I don't believe a word of it - that a seventeenth century duke fell in love with an actress at Covent Garden and she agreed to marry him if he bought the box he had first seen her from. I'm surprised the rabbits haven't had it for a hutch.

We ended at Askrigg, high up Wensleydale, and quite near to Hawes, notorious for its nineteenth century inhabitant Branwell Bronte and his literary sisters. We didn't get as far as Hawes, but did walk the hills, ending up at the very scenic Mill Gill Force, pictured here.










My last two pictures are not of real places at all, but railway models, that we came across on our travels. Somehow they look more realistic than lots of real places.

Fincham Church, Norfolk

We stumbled on the church in the village of Fincham in Norfolk a couple of days ago. There was nothing really to say it was anything different from a thousand other medieval churches in England, though the book did mention a crude Norman font. So, as we were going through anyway we stopped to have a look.

And the font really is a treasure, and in not that bad condition, apart from the fact that the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and the serpent in this first illustration have had to be replaced. They have done it sensitively so that there is no question as to what is original and what is replacement. Both Adam and Eve are clutching themselves - even groping themselves it might be said. The recent legal decision in Italy that it is an offence for men to touch their private parts against the evil eye would mean that Adam would be carted off to jail there.

You have to look twice at the carvings to make out what they are trying to depict. This next one, of the Nativity, had us puzzling at first as to the grouping on the right. At the bottom is the baby in the manger, and at the top the chrysamthemum shaped object must be the star. The two objects between, looking a bit like feet, made us think at first that the whole carving on this face of the font was of the Ascension. But then it dawned. The scene is the Nativity, and the two strange objects are the heads of the ox and ass, just sticking into the picture.

Joseph is on the right, holding a staff, and Mary stands stiffly in the middle.










These are the Wise Men, all holding up their gifts in their right hands.

The last side depicts the Baptism of Jesus, though the Jordan he is standing in looks more like this square font than the river it is supposed to be. The dove which is divebombing his head looks rather like an oven-ready chicken. The figure on the right is probably John the Baptist in his animal skin garments; the figure on the right could be anyone.

I have seen a suggestion on one website that the font came from another church in the parish when it was demolished in the seventeen hundreds, and that it is in fact Saxon, rather than Norman. That would figure. I have not seen such crude Norman carving before.

The church is well worth a visit just for the font, but we will stop next time we pass anyway, as we apparently missed a wonderful collection of gargoyles on the outside of the church.

Optimistic Seller

Woman phones me up yesterday and says she has some books to sell. I ask the usual questions - why does she possess them, how old are they etc. She tells me that she was a schoolteacher preparing pupils for A-Levels and university entrance but is now long retired. She tells me what some of the books are.

I tell her that they are rather out of date.

"They are," she admits. "They are totally out of date. That's why I am selling them."

I try to explain that that is why I have no interest in buying them, but she can't take this in. She seems to think students will buy them. Eh?

I try and explain some more.

"So next time you are in my area" (on the other side of the country) "will you drop in and look at them?" she asks.

No, I am afraid I won't. The poor woman at last rings off obviously confused and somewhat disappointed. Oh dear.

It would be nice though if I did have the ability to buy in old and out of date books and miraculously transform them into saleable commodities. I'd make my fortune and please lots of owners of old rubbish. I'll let you know when I do.

Late again.

So much for my resolution to write this up more often!

It is Friday and the website should have been updated on Wednesday, and it isn't. Got down to the garage on Weds morning to find that the internet connexion wasn't working. It goes down briefly quite often, but this time it wouldn't come back, so I phoned the broadband company. A nice young man in Cardiff patiently talked me through all the bootings and rebootings and pulling out of connections, and I patiently followed his instructions even though I had done those some actions myself several times before phoning.

After twenty minutes he said he would have to phone me back, which he did, and after another ten minutes he admitted that there did appear to be a fault in their line and said he would book me an engineer. My heart sank, as last time this meant a wait of ten days, during which time my only access to my emails and orders was through the local public library. But on looking he found an engineer who could come round that morning. And what is more, the chap arrived within a quarter of an hour.

More tests, which in the end he said only proved that I had some undefined fault in my own system. He went and got his laptop to show me that it would work fine. He got it. He plugged it in. He fiddled. He fiddled some more. It did not work. He went off to attach it to the junction box down the road. After ten minutes he came back and said there must be some as yet unreported fault covering a large area of Cambridge. Off he went.

I then had to find something to do with my day. Life without broadband is like a deadly dull limbo. You can't read emails so can't process orders. You can't check the news, listen to the radio, suss out the page of lies that the BBC calls a weather forecast. I opted for cataloguing books, but even that isn't easy if there is no access to Amazon, the Library of Congress and the British Library. Even if a book is already on my database, its current price has to be checked out on Amazon. And if it isn't on my database I need to download the details (via Readerware) from either Amazon or one of the other two sites I've mentioned above. So even the cataloguing option wasn't a complete operation.

When the postman came I had nothing for him, but at 3.50 the Virgin engineer phoned to say that he had been told that the system was up and running. He said he'd phone back in ten minutes to check if I had managed to get back online. Well I didn't, and he didn't, so after an hour and a half I phoned Virgin again. They checked, and told me that though the system was now largely up and running locally, there were still some problems with individual routing stations. Finally, yesterday morning at around 11am we went back online and I set to and processed the orders that had accumulated over the previous two days. And later this morning I will actually get to updating the website.

In the meantime Cambridge continues dull, breezy, and not all that warm. However, my internet connexion works, so all is bright in the world!

Late start to 2008

We've just posted the catalogue update that should have been published the day after New Year. Things have been a little chaotic as a new computer arrived on Thursday morning and the last few days have been spent setting it up. As a computer incompetent I always put off buying new equipment as long as I can, but the time had come when I could delay no more. All the work has actually been by my younger son, Harry, a deft and patient solver of computer problems, who kindly put off his return to university by a day so as to be able to sort me out.

So apologies if you have been waiting for the latest books on our lists. To be honest, not much has been catalogued over the holidays, but we shall be back in production over the next week as I catalogue further boxes of the early church archaeologist and historian William Frend's books.

Last year, 2007, was a good one for us. I chronicled our visit to Sicily in an earlier blog. What I never did get round to recording was a weekend in Lille, Northern France, at the end of November, to see the Christmas Market and generally enjoy being in France for a few days. Now that the Eurostar trains start their journey at St Pancras, right next to King's Cross, the station where trains from Cambridge come into London, we are in a position to be whisked effortlessly across the Channel without a tedious cross-London trek.

My other highlights of the year include my turning sixty, the wedding of our eldest, George, and acquiring two new bicycles. The first is a Brompton, a folder which can be taken on buses and trains and in the back of the car and is proving very useful, and the other a big solid Dutch bike with a huge front basket and panniers, just right for shopping and carrying things back and forth from my allotment (another new venture this year). On the cycling front it is disappointing to have to report that the rotten weather and certain weekend family commitments have meant that I did not do as much recreational riding this year as in the previous few years.

If I have one New Year resolution, it is to write this blog more often. We shall see. Happy New Year to my readers and customers.

Support a Great New Walking and Cycling Scheme

I'm not a lover of the idea of a national lottery, but we have one, and this December there is going to be a contest between four worthy causes on ITV. There will be a national vote, and the winning project will get 50 million pounds. The losers will get nothing.

All the projects which have reached the final are worthy. They are The Eden Project in Cornwall, the Black Country Urban Park, Sherwood Forest in Nottinghamshire, and Connect2, a walking and cycling initiative. The special thing about Connect2 is that it is not limited to one small part of the country as the other three are - rather it involves 79 different schemes dotted around the whole land. As such I think it deserves our votes. I append a summary provided by its organisers.

Connect2 needs your vote!

Would you like to see fifty million pounds invested in walking and cycling across the UK?

Sustrans needs you to vote for Connect2, one of 4 projects competing on TV in the Big Lottery Fund's: The People's 50 Million Pound Contest this December. There will only be one winner - your help is vital to make sure it is Connect2.

If Connect wins, millions of people will be able to travel in a healthy and environmentally-friendly way because Connect2 will create new walking and cycling routes for the journeys we all make every day.

In 79 cities, towns and villages, new crossings and bridges will be created over busy roads, railway lines and rivers, linking into new networks of local paths to get you to the shops, school, work, the park or to see family and friends. Connect2 will take you directly and safely to where you want to go.

With Connect2 schemes planned in Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and England there's likely to be one near you. If you'd like to see Connect2 happen please register today so we can get in touch to let you know when and how to vote. Visit www.sustransconnect2.org.uk or text the word Connect2 to 80010. Alternatively, call 0845 058 13 73.