Deir ez-Zor

Deir ez-Zor grew where the Euphrates offered a crossing between the Syrian steppe and the Jazira plains, on a route travelled since antiquity by traders between Mesopotamia and the Mediterranean. The valley around it was old country — Mari downstream was a rich city-state in the third and second millennia BC, and Dura-Europos a Seleucid foundation that became a Roman garrison facing Persia — but the town itself was a modest riverside settlement for most of its history.

Its rise came under late Ottoman rule in the 19th century, when the government made it the seat of the Zor Sanjak, a district answering directly to Istanbul and created to bring the Euphrates tribes under administration. Officials, garrisons, merchants and craftsmen arrived, a riverside quarter of markets and khans took shape, and the town became the recognised capital of the Syrian east. In 1915 and 1916 the deserts around it became the end point of the Armenian deportations, and the name of the city has carried that meaning ever since; an Armenian genocide memorial church was built there in 1991 and was destroyed in 2014.

The French mandate added the suspension bridge of 1927, a landmark for generations, and made the city a base for the archaeologists excavating Mari, Dura-Europos and the tells of the Khabur. After independence, oil and gas discovered in the surrounding desert and irrigation along the river made the province economically important, and the city grew quickly. From 2011 it was fought over repeatedly, much of it was destroyed, and the suspension bridge was brought down. Rebuilding has gone on since, much of it by residents themselves.

The city belongs to the tribal Arab world of the Euphrates rather than to the merchant cities of western Syria, and the difference is audible in the dialect, which is closer to the speech of Iraq than to that of Damascus. Large tribal confederations such as the Uqaidat and the Baggara have long shaped politics, marriages, land and the settling of disputes, and a mediated tribal settlement is still often preferred to a court.

Hospitality follows a formal pattern: guests are received in a reception room or tent, bitter coffee scented with cardamom is poured in small quantities from a long-spouted pot, and a sheep may be killed for an honoured visitor. Meals are eaten from a shared tray, with guests served first and pressed to eat more. Poetry in the Bedouin manner, recited and sung, is a respected accomplishment, and weddings bring drumming, line dancing and processions through the streets.

Society here is conservative and family-centred, and religious observance is mainstream Sunni Islam; small Christian and other communities lived in the city before the war. The river itself is part of local identity — swimming, fishing, picnics on the banks and the evening walk along the corniche — and the destruction of the suspension bridge was felt as the loss of a symbol rather than just a crossing. Memory of the Armenian deportations gives the city a place in another people's history, marked each April by Armenians worldwide.

Deir ez-Zor is the largest city of eastern Syria and the seventh largest in the country. The war displaced most of them at one time or another; many have returned to damaged homes and neighbourhoods, and the population now is uncertain. The city is overwhelmingly Arab, with strong ties between urban families and the villages along the river.

Its economy rests on the river and the desert. Irrigated farming on both banks produces wheat, cotton, vegetables and melons; the oil and gas fields of the province supplied much of Syria's output before the war and their revenues have long been contested; and the city lives on trade, transport, government offices and, in recent years, on aid and reconstruction work. Jobs are scarce and much work is informal.

Daily life starts early to beat the heat, with markets and fieldwork in the morning, a long quiet afternoon and families out on the corniche and on roofs after dark. Electricity and water supply are intermittent, and generators and tankers fill the gaps. The dominant concerns are clearing rubble and unexploded ordnance, restoring the river crossings, housing and property disputes, the fate of people detained or missing, and the pace at which services return.

Eastern Syrian cooking is plainer than that of Aleppo or Damascus and closer to the food of Iraq and the Bedouin. The centrepiece of any feast is lamb or mutton, boiled or slow-cooked in a large pot and served on a mound of rice or over layers of flatbread soaked in broth, eaten with the hand from a shared tray. Ouzi and similar rice-and-meat dishes appear at weddings, and grilled kebab and kofta are the everyday restaurant food.

The Euphrates gives the city its distinctive dish: carp and other river fish split open, salted and grilled slowly over a wood fire by the water, a method shared with the Iraqi masgouf. In spring, after good rains, kama — desert truffles gathered from the steppe — are sold by the sack in the markets and cooked with meat or rice. Dairy from sheep and goats comes as laban, thick strained labneh, salty cheeses and kishk, dried yoghurt and burghul, which is reconstituted into a winter soup.

Bread is baked on the wall of a clay tannour oven and eaten with everything. Wheat from the plains becomes burghul and freekeh; river gardens supply tomatoes, cucumbers and the melons the valley is known for; and dates, figs and pistachios fill the sweet shops alongside simple semolina pastries. Tea, strong and very sweet, is drunk all day, and the bitter cardamom coffee of the tribes opens and closes every formal visit.