My Syrian travel before the war
I visited Syria in February 2010, just months, if not weeks, before the beginning of the unrest that utterly led to the civil war. This is why the memory of this travel weighed heavily in me, by the idea that most travels are just squeezed between one conflict and another. And even at that moment, Bosra made a particularly grim impression on me. Not just by the basaltic aspect of the city; also by a particular poverty of its inhabitants. There are different kinds of poverty, characterised by different types of absence. In Bosra, as I saw it, the absence was beyond the material things. It was a deeper, more essential lack of reason to exist, a sort of suspension in the history.
I also visited other places, those musts of a European grand tour: Krak des Chevaliers, Palmyra, Damascus with its Omayyad mosque and the old city. How much do I regret not having seen more!... And also, not having been kinder, more generous to the country's inhabitants, children of ten selling postcards on the sites, green-eyed adolescents attempting to establish any sort of contact, in view of who knows what future.
I also visited other places, those musts of a European grand tour: Krak des Chevaliers, Palmyra, Damascus with its Omayyad mosque and the old city. How much do I regret not having seen more!... And also, not having been kinder, more generous to the country's inhabitants, children of ten selling postcards on the sites, green-eyed adolescents attempting to establish any sort of contact, in view of who knows what future.
Bosra
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Palmyra
Coming to my old photos of Palmyra, the sensation of loss intensifies; some of the old stones I saw there are no more. What about the juvenile sellers of postcards, boys and girls in traditional dress? Where are they?
Damascus
In a hammam.
The interior of the Omayyad mosque.
Mausoleum of Ruqaya, the so called Crystal Mosque.
