Nostalgia Commodified: Old Damascus

By Christa Salamandra

Fall 2007 | ArteZine

Before the 1990s, elite Damascenes rarely ventured into the Old City, a place then associated with the backwardness of an embarrassing past. Most wealthy, “old notable” families moved from their Old City neighborhoods decades ago; their children and grandchildren are returning to them now, not to live as their ancestors had, nor to shop like the peasants and tourists, but to spend leisure hours in restaurants, cafés, nightclubs and art galleries. Linked to a process of economic liberalization, the transformation of the Old City into a leisure site is profoundly reshaping social, cultural and economic life in historic Damascus.

Domestic architecture has become the lynchpin of two interrelated phenomena. For a reinvigorated entrepreneurial class, Old City houses serve as lucrative restaurant sites, and a winning restaurant theme. For the Old Damascus heritage industry, they form the locus of nostalgia and social distinction, marking those who share a memory of the way of life they were once home to from those who do not. In a global culture that places a premium on local authenticity, commodified forms and representations of old merchant houses offer a taste of the distinctly Damascene.

Until the late nineteenth century, most houses in Damascus were constructed in the traditional Mediterranean style, with a single entrance and a central courtyard, onto which the rooms of the house opened. Grand houses consisted of several courtyards, but rarely more than two stories. Even poorer homes had wells, and sometimes fountains, in their courtyard. Trees and plants colored and shaded this central open space. In the early part of the twentieth century, urban notables began to leave their Arab-style, Old City houses for the newly built modern apartments of the “garden districts,” towards the slopes of Mount Qasiun. Elite families of the period welcomed and actively encouraged urban modernization. Old City activist Siham Tergeman describes this migration:

It started with a few families, who built factories—the first private [industrial] production in Syria. They became very rich, and wanted to live in villas. So they went to the orchard areas and built villas, one after another, and this is how the neighborhood of Abu Rummana came into being. All the rich Damascene families moved there. The families still living in the Old City started to imitate them, so al-Rawda and al-Jisr al-Abyad were built. In their era the French built a few neighborhoods, like that of the Franciscan [Parish], built in the French style, with iron balconies. These houses were what the Damascenes began to want, and they became for the upper classes (al-akabir), the “high society.” They wanted to move to flats, because Arab-style houses were tiring, needed a lot of work, with their trees shedding leaves, and stairs the women had to climb up and down. (1)

A few Damascene families—particularly those in Christian areas—have remained in their Old City houses, but most have been replaced by rural migrants from a variety of regional backgrounds. Often living several families to a large merchant house, many of these middle-class artisans and skilled laborers would leave the difficult, crowded conditions of Old Damascus if given the chance, and move to the comfort and convenience of modern style apartments.

Restaurateurs and hoteliers form the latest wave of migrants, transforming the Old City as profoundly as their rural predecessors. When, as a student in 1986, I rented a room in the Bab Tuma quarter, the narrow, winding residential alleyways of the Old City constituted semi-private space. Those who walked them were usually well-known; strangers elicited stares and sometimes questions. Those same tiny streets are now fully public, and regularly traversed by New City dwellers out on the old town at all hours. Before the leisure boom, taxis rarely ventured beyond the main thoroughfares of the ancient Greek gridiron; now cars stream through slender lanes, pinning pedestrians against doorways, filling the air with exhaust.

Except for a few—often non-Syrian—aficionados, children of the old elite families have not moved back to reside in Old Damascus. But the Old City serves as part-time home to a burgeoning, well-heeled clientele. Seventy-three restaurants and cafés service patrons in search of the local exotic. (2) Two boutique hotels have opened and several others are planned. The effects of this commercialization of formerly residential space on the fabric of social life are undoubtedly profound. When I asked one resident about his relationship with his neighbors, he replied: “ Neighbors? What neighbors? They are building a restaurant on one side of us, another restaurant on the other side, and a hotel behind”

Entrepreneurs argue—and Old City preservation activists concede—that turning old merchant houses into commercial establishments may be the only way to save the old city’s architectural heritage. Vulnerable to the elements and requiring specialized craftsmanship, courtyard houses are expensive to restore and maintain.

Designed for extended families of multiple adult housewives, such houses, Damascenes argue, are not conducive to contemporary lifestyles. Commercialization appears either a necessary evil, or a reinvigoration of traditional urban forms. An architect from one of the old notable families sees in the new restaurants and cafés a revitalization of an older way of life interrupted by decades of socialist austerity:

There are people who call for preserving the city as it was previously. I’m among those who say no, a city needs infrastructure: water, electricity, parking. People need to park their cars where they live. Also, it needs services, not just residents. Years ago, Old Damascus had restaurants, inns, hotels, cafés. Cafés were of course recreation. It had everything. Later, it was the opposite. In order for a city to more forward, there must be new services, like restaurants, even maybe pubs and hotels. At the same time there must be complete restoration, and basic services, like parking, within the framework of the general character of the historical city.

Yet the scale of development concerns many who work to promote Old Damascus. According to Hisham al-Satti, President of the organization Friends of Damascus:

Old Damascus can support five restaurants, each holding 200 people, meaning one thousand can enjoy themselves on any night in the Old City without harming the atmosphere. But we now have many times this number… The new developments are a double-edged sword; the disadvantages outweigh the benefit. (3)

Restaurants are but one of many cultural forms reflecting Old Damascus nostalgia. Visual art poetry, prose fiction and memoirs such as Siham Tergeman’s O Wealth of Damascus (Ya Mal al-Sham) eulogize the courtyard house and its fruit tress, winding, jasmine-scented lanes, and the close-knit social relations of old. (4) Television miniseries, musalsal-s, are perhaps the most widely consumed of these cultural products. These 30 episode dramas are typically shown on consecutive nights during the fasting month of Ramadan, a season of intense nostalgia, very much like Christmas in some American circles. They form part of ramadaniyat, the reminiscences and reflection that characterize public culture during the holy month. Old Damascus of the early nationalist period—late Ottoman and French Mandate—provides the setting for numerous dramas, notably the works of Damascene director Bassam al-Malla. In Damascene Days (Ayyam Shamiyya) of 1993, Bygone Days (al-Khawali) of 2001 and Salhiyya Nights (Layali Salhiyya) of 2004, and The Quarter Gate (Bab al-Hara) of 2006, al-Malla married themes of Old City authenticity and resistance to foreign occupation. Such rosy, sanitized depictions of life in Old Damascus provoke a wide range of responses, from enthusiastic devotion to hostile derision.

Cultural representations of Old Damascus hit a social nerve. They reflect the struggles of recent history, the political demise of an old Sunni Muslim urban elite, and its replacement by a peasant regime from an historically stigmatized religious sect: the ‘Alawis. As in so many cities, an influx of migrants over the past forty years has dwarfed the population of established urbanites. But in Damascus, those outsiders, formerly subordinate country folk, have become the ruling elite. Explicit opposite is dangerous; Old Damascus revivalism is a safe form of resistance. Paradoxically, many of these forms—television series, restaurants, state sponsored art exhibits and commercially published books—reflect cooperation with the very forces they critique. As one member of an elite Damascene family puts it:

The phenomenon of restaurants in Old Damascus is a clear expression of the new order. An ordinary Damascene could never get a license to open a restaurant. An Old Damascene will give the place his name, but he’ll have to go into partnership with a son of the regime to get permission to open it.

Old Damascus itself and the efforts to preserve, remake, represent and market it have become points of contention among people differently placed within the social configuration of the city. For the city’s old families, Old Damascus revivalism gives voice to a local identity long discouraged by Ba’thist ideology. The growing interest in the Old City has breathed new life into Friends of Damascus, which now boasts a website, a glossy monthly and 1,700 members. A reorganized network of committees focuses on architectural preservation, environmental preservation, cultural, and heritage. While the organization is often associated with lavish social events, Al-Satti emphasizes its efforts to halt destruction of the intramural Old City, and its more recent work to protect areas beyond its walls, now threatened by road expansion and highrise development.

Not all Damascus dwellers see Friends of Damascus as a benign influence. Many of those whose ancestors hail from outside the city point to the organizations’ exclusivity, and see manifestations of Old Damascus revivalism as veiled sectarian and regional prejudice. Even ardent Old Damascus proponents, who agree with the organizations’ expressed aims, argue that Friends of Damascus is more concerned with maintaining elite social relations than it is with preserving architecture. Others, like the Damascene architect, object to the veneration of all that is old, and point to the dynamism of living cities:

I like Friends of Damascus, but I think they’re not an intellectual movement; they’re a club. They don’t have a philosophy or a clear project of their own, and every project proposed for Damascus they fight against. Ok, this is what you want, you want to renovate buildings. But you cannot fight every project. Cities renew themselves, cities move forward, they don’t stop. Damascus is not a monument; it was built through a project, the Greeks had a plan. This gave it its character. So we have to implement new projects, to move forward.

Adapted from A New Old Damascus: Authenticity and Distinction in Urban Syria. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. An earlier, shorter version of this essay appeared in Anthropology News, January 2007.

Footnotes:

1. Interview with the author March 1996.

2. Licensing Department, Syrian Ministry of Tourism, August 2005.

3. All interviews conducted by the author in July and August 2005.

4. Sse contributions by Darwish, Qabbani, Shannon and Taleghani.

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