Shafik Meghji

The Taurus Express

14/08/20

Just short of the border, as the ragged Taurus mountains gave way to barren plains, I noticed a problem: my Syrian visa, obtained from the embassy in London the week before, had the following day’s date on it. “Maybe there will be somewhere to stay on the Turkish side,” said my friend Matt, safely in possession of a correctly-dated visa. The Taurus Express trundled on, rarely breaking 30 miles an hour, until the Turkish-Syrian frontier post rolled into view. It was a lonely, empty-looking place, with few buildings, let alone a hotel. “Don’t worry, I’ll wait for you in Aleppo,” said Matt, as we clambered off the train into the chilly afternoon air.

But for the first time in my travelling life the combination of an Islamic name and a well-worn British passport speeded up an immigration check, rather than provoking suspicious questions and interminable delays. The official glanced at my passport, smiled broadly, warmly welcomed me to the “Syrian Arab Republic”, and ushered me and Matt across without so much as a cursory look at my visa. The middle-aged American couple behind us fared less well, receiving a hostile 45-minute interrogation before being grudgingly allowed in, even though their passports and visas were clearly in order.

At 8.55am the previous morning the Taurus Express (Toros Ekspresi in Turkish) had departed promptly from Istanbul’s Haydarpaşa station. Launched in 1930 and once travelling all the way to Baghdad, the service was originally run by the Wagons-Lit company, operator of the Orient Express. Hercule Poirot takes the Taurus Express in the opening pages of Murder on the Orient Express, having “saved the honour of the French Army” from an unspecified Middle Eastern mishap.

By the time of my journey in the summer of 2008, the service had lost much of its lustre but remained one of the world’s great railway journeys, a weekly service with a single sleeper carriage that covered the 864-mile stretch between Istanbul and Aleppo in northwest Syria in 29 hours (at least in theory). A one-way ticket cost just £29. It was a stop-start trip, passing through cities such as Afyon, a centre of opium production under the Ottomans (“Afyon” is Turkish for opium) and dominated by a citadel-topped tower of rock, and Konya, former capital of the Selçuk empire and adopted home of Celaleddin Rumi, the Sufi mystic who founded the Whirling Dervishes.

Hercule Poirot's Taurus Express arrived only five minutes late; we were not so fortunate. It was a tortuous, seemingly endless chug from the border post through olive groves, deserted settlements and ruined buildings. At 9pm, seven hours behind schedule, we pulled into the Gare de Baghdad, ravenous for dinner: no food was available on board, and we had long since finished the supplies we’d picked up in Istanbul, leaving only a bag of gum-cuttingly sharp sunflower seeds.

Built in 1912, Aleppo's main railway station retained a stately elegance: polished marble floors, dusty chandeliers, grandfather clocks, Syrian flags strung from the arched ceiling, and foamy water dribbling from a fountain into a small pool, as well as a bust of former dictator Hafez al-Assad tucked away in the corner. We picked a taxi driver from the scrum by the exit, over which stood a sombre portrait of Hafez’s son and successor, Bashar al-Assad, and hustled into the cab for the drive to our guesthouse.

“2008 was a brief moment of optimism”

The original plan had been to zip through Syria to our ultimate destination, Lebanon, but a bout of unrest in Beirut meant crossing the border was difficult and probably unwise. At that point, Syria was the safer option from a travel point of view: as unlikely as it seems now, 2008 was a brief moment of optimism for the country's tourist industry, with long-held tensions with western governments gradually easing, despite the widespread human rights abuses of the brutal Assad regime. A scattering of travel features had appeared in the international press and tourist numbers were rising, albeit from a low base.

So Matt and I decided to take a meandering route from Aleppo to Damascus, two of the oldest continually inhabited cities on Earth. Dating back to around 6,000 BCE, the former has always been a meeting point between the Mediterranean and Mesopotamia, an ancient crossroads with enduring Ottoman, Armenian, Greek, French and Jewish influences. On a short walk through the winding streets, lemon trees perfuming the air, we passed mosques, churches and a synagogue. Mentioned twice by Shakespeare (by a witch in Macbeth and in Othello's final speech), Aleppo’s grand old buildings were being restored, townhouses with hidden courtyards and elegant wooden doors had been turned into hotels, and rooftop restaurants offered views across to the elevated thirteenth-century citadel, a sandy-coloured construction in the city’s heart.

Aleppo’s focal point, however, was the world's largest covered market, the labyrinthine Souq al-Madina. An enduring testament to the city’s trading heritage and position on the Silk Road, the cacophonous souq sold a bewildering array of local and imported goods: precarious towers of gleaming dates, overflowing sacks of coffee beans, bloody carcasses of goats, cows and camels, pungent spices in wooden bowls, platters of pistachios, rounds of fresh white cheese wrapped in cloth, cases of jewellery, textiles, silk and dyes, and greasy olive oil soaps. Craftsmen rhythmically hammered out copper plates, while buzzing circular saws were used to fashion wooden furnishings. Every few moments a delivery boy rattled across the cobblestones on a heavily-laden bike, motorised cart or weary donkey. Over tulip-shaped glasses of tea, we swapped stories with a carpet-seller whose family had owned a store here for centuries.

In the evening we joined the students in the rather brutalist city centre, smoking apple-wood shishas, sipping fresh juices, eating delicately-spiced kebabs, and listening to tinny Syrian pop music. A short walk away, but lodged seemingly in another century, was the Baron Hotel. Built by an Armenian family in the early 1900s, it was once one of the grandest places to stay in the Middle East: past guests included TE Lawrence, Theodore Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Gamal Abdel Nasser, as well as Agatha Christie, who wrote part of Murder on the Orient Express in room 203. By the time of our visit, however, the hotel’s glory days were long gone. The bar area, with its aged armchairs, leather stools, frayed rugs, and high-beamed ceiling, was faded and a little tatty, but the black-jacketed bartender retained an old-time flourish.

“Palmyra (City of Palms) was one of the ancient world’s most important cultural centres”

On a knuckle of land punched into the Mediterranean, 112 miles southwest of Aleppo, Latakia had that faintly transgressive air common to ports – a place of shady deals, smuggled goods, hole-in-the-wall off licenses, the occasional short skirt. With its expanses of palm-shaded beaches, the city promoted itself as a seaside resort, and just outside the centre were avenues of whitewashed villas and hotels in varying stages of completion, as locals readied themselves for the anticipated waves of tourists. But when we passed through there was no one there, giving the streets the artificial feel of a film set at the end of a shoot. The only other guests at our monolithic, sun-bleached hotel were a few holidaying Lebanese families playing bat-and-ball on the sand, riding aged carousels, and mopping up pans of chicken stew with hunks of flatbread.

From Latakia we headed to Hama, a city that felt like a small town. A set of large norias, thousand-year-old wooden waterwheels, slowly churned the Orontes river, which arcs through the city centre. In the compact old quarter we joined local families as they spent their evening wandering through the river-side parks, shaded by stone aqueducts, and stopping to select from gleaming trays of honey-dripping baklava. The next day, with Matt unwell, I made the 118-mile journey east to Palmyra in a beautifully-maintained vintage Chevrolet with a cheerful local guide named Majid and a portly, rapidly perspiring Belgian tourist. We soon swapped the sprawl of Hama for a stony desert, passing the occasional road sign to Baghdad en route.

Built around an oasis, surrounded by sand dunes wind-sculpted into waves, Palmyra (City of Palms) was one of the ancient world’s most important cultural centres. Like Aleppo, it stood on the Silk Route and was an important stop-off for caravans travelling between the Persian Gulf and the Mediterranean. Encroached upon by unforgiving desert, the city's inhabitants have long since departed, though the adjoining – more modern – town of Tadmor had a clutch of cafes and souvenir shops.

The first written records of Palmyra date from 1800 BCE, and it is mentioned in the Bible, but the city came into its own under the Romans, who gave its leaders significant autonomy and granted citizenship to its inhabitants. Trade flourished with the Roman empire, Persia, India and China, bringing great wealth and giving Palmyra a cultured, cosmopolitan character, evident in its distinct blend of Greco-Roman, Persian and classical Syrian architecture. The crumbling temples, palaces, tombs and avenues were adorned with beautiful granite columns, arches, towers, frescos and inscriptions.

The city's mélange of influences was also symbolised by its most famous ruler, Queen Zenobia, who had Greek, Arabic and – some say – Jewish heritage, and claimed to be a descendant of Cleopatra. She came to power in the third century, conquered territory in Egypt and led a famous, if ultimately doomed, revolt against the Romans. Later the city fell into a long decline, before being unearthed in the seventeenth century. It was easy to imagine Zenobia strolling along Palmyra's glorious main street, lined with columns and curving sensuously beneath a monumental arch. It ended at a portico, close to the partially-excavated Camp of Diocletian, thought to be the queen’s palace. Beyond here was a valley of atmospheric tombs, more underground mansions than mere burial sites. To the east was the most impressive ruin, the grand Temple of Bel, dedicated to the Babylonian equivalent of Zeus.

The next day a refreshed Matt and I headed south through the nondescript urban sprawl of Homs and west to Krak des Chevaliers, described by TE Lawrence as “perhaps the best preserved and most wholly admirable castle in the world”. Built between 1142 and 1271 by the Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, the Crusader castle was perched imperiously on a hillside and withstood droughts, earthquakes and attacks by Saladin in the twelfth century, before eventually falling to the Mamluks. From the thick ramparts I gazed southwards beyond the villages that surrounded the base of the fortress to the cedar-covered rises of Lebanon, barely 10 miles away.

“Damascus appeared more conservative, insular and supportive of Assad. Yet there were cracks in the facade”

Dusty high rises studded with satellite dishes and traffic jams of yellow taxis, their drivers impotently honking at each other, gave downtown Damascus the vague look of New York, albeit New York sometime in the 1970s. Vying with Aleppo for the title of the oldest continuously occupied city on Earth, Damascus appeared more conservative, insular and supportive of Assad than its northern counterpart.

Yet there were cracks in the facade: on street corners shifty teenagers sold counterfeit American DVDs, a dubious-looking “club” sat close to the bustling central post office, and near the Al-Hamidiyah Souq, whose cast-iron roof resembled a Victorian arcade, was a street of lingerie shops selling kitsch erotica like glow-in-the-dark G-strings, French maid’s outfits, and even musical knickers.

Inside Damascus’s walled old city, near the glorious Umayyad Mosque – one of the most renowned sites in the Islamic world, home to Saladin’s tomb and a shrine to John the Baptist – was the twelfth-century Hammam Nureddin. The domed waiting room of the bathhouse, the oldest in Damascus, smelt of olive oil (used in the massages), black tea, cigarette smoke, and sweat. A hulking masseur with a rotund stomach, matted-hair arms and unsmiling countenance gestured at me. Attendants rather needlessly helped me out of my clothes and into a rectangular cloth the size and texture of a tea towel.

What followed felt more like an assault than a massage – face pressed firmly against the marble tables, bones clicked out of joints, limbs forced into unnatural positions – but afterwards I felt fantastic, rejuvenated, taller even. Inside the steam rooms, which ascended in temperature, Matt and I sipped iced water as local men discussed business deals and read newspapers, the print leaving inky stains on their finger tips.

After a dinner of lamb kebabs flavoured with pomegranate molasses, fattoush, and cups of cardamom coffee we headed back to the Al-Hamidiyah Souq to visit Bakdash, a famous ice cream parlour. There white-suited staff used large wooden paddles to churn the ice cream, creating a creamy texture that contrasted perfectly with the coating of crushed pistachios.

On the final day the stifling heat, which had built steadily throughout the trip, finally got too much, so we slipped into the Four Seasons and retreated to the pool, eavesdropping on the scions of Damascus’s elite, who sipped G&Ts, chatted on their mobiles and eyed up their fellow sunbathers from behind their Ray-Bans.

“The summer of 2008 felt like a beginning but it was actually an ending”

At the time, the summer of 2008 felt like a beginning, but it was actually an ending. The crushing impact of Syria’s repressive regime was easy to see, the ubiquitous images of Assad – behind hotel receptions, attached to shop fronts, stuck to bus windscreens – a glaring reminder the country was under watch. Yet conversations with locals – a student in Aleppo who thanked us for visiting “my Syria”, the gently flirtatious girls in the Syrian Air office in Damascus, a barber in Latakia who teased Matt for his rather ragged haircut – hinted better times might lie ahead. At least that’s how it seemed from our privileged vantage point. Three years later, the “Arab spring” reached Syria, with popular protests demanding long-overdue political reforms and social justice. They were brief flashes of hope, soon extinguished.

Travellers often fool themselves the places they visit somehow remain preserved after their departure; Syria, brutally, allows no such illusions. The Taurus Express no longer runs and the country I experienced does not exist. Places like Aleppo, Latakia and Hama, once little known to many in the west, are now horrifyingly familiar. As of March 2020, the UK-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights estimated that more than 380,000 people have been killed since the start of the civil war in 2011, including over 115,000 civilians. According to UN estimates, 11.8 million Syrians – almost half the population – have been displaced from their homes, with 5.5 million of them fleeing the country completely. Sheltered in overcrowded and poorly equipped refugee camps they are now at heightened risk from Covid-19.

On top of the incalculable human suffering, Syria's cultural heritage has also been devastated. Much of Aleppo, including the Souq al-Madina, has been destroyed. So-called Islamic State fighters blew-up many of Palmyra’s monuments and left the site open to looters. Krak des Chevaliers was occupied by rebel and then regime fighters, its ancient archer slits used by modern snipers. An airstrike damaged one of the towers and much of the interior was reduced to rubble.

I keep coming back to a conversation I had with the taxi driver who picked me and Matt up from Aleppo’s Gare de Baghdad. “You can do whatever you want here,” he said, before nodding at the small portrait of Assad hanging above his dashboard. “As long as you stay out of politics.”