Rory's Syrian Journal by Allardice Rory

Author:Allardice, Rory [Allardice, Rory]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Travel Orientation
Published: 2014-12-21T22:00:00+00:00

As we drove through the countryside, there was a lot of evidence of women working in the fields. When I casually asked where all the men were and why there were so many women working in the fields, I was told that it was because the women were cheaper.

Sights near Aleppo

Coming back from the shopping

Serious Dog Collar

Traditional Tatoos

On our return to Aleppo, we were taken to visit an Assyrian artist, Yakob Ibrahim, a very original Assyrian painter who charged $ 2,000 – 4,000 for his paintings. However, the prices were outwith my very limited travelling budget, it was only the second day of my trip, and it would not have been very practical to have a large painting to carry around with me. I was shy about taking photos of his work, which would maybe have been inappropriate, but I remember being struck by the bright, bold colours and interesting figurative compositions and it is easy to find his work on the internet, which confirms my initial impressions of its originality. I hadn’t come across Assyrians before. I was aware of the Assyrian Empire but had assumed that it had gone the way of the Sumerians and Hittites. Since then, I have met Assyrians from Iraq and Armenia and understand that they suffered a similar fate to the Armenians between 1915 and 1920 in Turkey. While at Yakob’s gallery, we met Isa and Sarah (from Austria). Isa had taken some remarkable photos of a rare Sufi ceremony, which had been nine years in the planning. Thus, we had some fascinating glimpses of the cultural diversity of this country.

That evening, we ate in the Al-Andalip Restaurant, near our hotel. It was a rooftop restaurant. We were shown into the lively kitchen, where we made our selection, which we washed down with a bottle of tasty, local rosé wine.

One strange memory, which I have of Syria in the summer of 2005, was that all the vans, buses and lorries (and possibly some cars) were fitted with the Lambada tune, which was activated to warn other drivers and pedestrians when they were reversing. This incongruous, sexy dance music from Brazil had been sold to all motor vehicles for the safety of pedestrians, and I imagined the person who had sold this to the police traffic department laughing all the way to the bank. I also had the strange vision of the culturally inappropriate Lambada dances breaking out spontaneously in the streets every time a vehicle reversed. The Lambada tune also brought back memories of my early days in wintry Poland, at the end of the 1980s, just as Communism had fallen. At that time, this raunchy video of the song was on every illegal satellite channel. At the same time, the local population would buy the most outrageously bright shirts and clothes as a scream of liberation from the conformity of the past. Such clothes would look as extreme today as the big shoulder pads and big hairdos of the eighties, but they were necessary at the time.

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