Damascus & the South

Damascus grew up where the Barada river leaves the Anti-Lebanon mountains and fans out into the Ghouta, an oasis of orchards on the edge of the desert. It was an Aramaean kingdom in the early first millennium BC, then an Assyrian, Persian, Greek and Roman city, and the Roman street plan — including the Via Recta, the "street called Straight" of the Acts of the Apostles, where Paul was taken after his conversion — still shapes the old city. South of the capital, the Nabataeans and then Rome held the Hauran; Bosra became capital of the Roman province of Arabia after 106 AD, and Shahba was rebuilt as Philippopolis by the emperor Philip the Arab, who was born there.

The Arab conquest reached Damascus in 634, and from 661 to 750 the city was capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, whose empire stretched from Spain to Central Asia. Later it was a base for Nur al-Din and Saladin, who is buried beside the Umayyad Mosque, a Mamluk provincial capital, and from 1516 an Ottoman city on the pilgrim road to Mecca. The Druze settled the mountain south-east of the Hauran, now Jabal al-Arab, in the 19th century, and from there Sultan al-Atrash led the Great Syrian Revolt against French rule in 1925.

After independence Damascus became the seat of every government, including the Assad family's from 1970. Israel captured most of the Golan Heights in 1967 and effectively annexed the area in 1981, a move not recognised by most of the world; Quneitra was returned in ruins in 1974, inside a UN-patrolled buffer zone. The 2011 uprising began in Daraa, the besieged Ghouta suffered some of the war's worst attacks, and in December 2024 opposition forces entered Damascus as Bashar al-Assad fled, after which Israeli forces took over the Golan buffer zone.

The region holds most of Syria's diversity in a small space. Damascus is a largely Sunni city with old Christian quarters around Bab Tuma and Bab Sharqi, the Shia shrine of Sayyida Zaynab on its outskirts, Kurdish and Palestinian neighbourhoods, and a merchant class proud of its manners and its Damascene accent, long the standard of Syrian television drama. Suwayda province is the heartland of Syria's Druze, a close-knit faith community with its own religious leadership, white-turbaned sheikhs and a strong tradition of self-reliance. The Hauran is a Sunni tribal and farming country where clan ties run deep, and the Golan foothills have Circassian villages, descendants of refugees settled by the Ottomans in the 19th century.

In the Qalamoun mountains north of the capital, Maaloula and two neighbouring villages, Jubb'adin and Bakh'a, are the last places where a Western Aramaic dialect is still spoken, and Maaloula and Saydnaya are old Christian pilgrimage towns; Saydnaya's feast of Our Lady on 8 September draws Muslim as well as Christian pilgrims.

Damascus gave its name to damask cloth and Damascus steel, and its covered souks still sell textiles, copper and glassware. The city's old coffee houses and the courtyard house, closed to the street and open to the sky, are defining institutions.

Damascus counted about 1.5 million people in the city itself at the 2004 census, at the centre of a metropolitan area estimated at around five million. Daraa, Suwayda and the towns of the Ghouta are the other main centres, while Quneitra province is thinly populated. Much of the eastern Ghouta, parts of Daraa and the southern Damascus suburbs were heavily damaged, and rebuilding is slow.

Before the war the capital was the seat of government, banking, trade and the universities, and the south farmed wheat, olives and vegetables on the Hauran plain and apples and grapes in the Suwayda highlands. Today the economy runs on small trade, remittances from relatives abroad and aid, with public salaries worth little, and many young men from the south work in the Gulf or Lebanon.

The day in Damascus starts early, with bread queues and traffic on the ring roads, and slows in the afternoon heat; evenings fill the old city's cafés and the family gatherings on rooftops. Electricity cuts, fuel prices, the return of displaced families and the question of how the new authorities will govern a diverse south are the issues of the moment.

Damascus is the home of refined urban Levantine cooking. Breakfast is fatteh, foul (stewed fava beans with oil and lemon) and msabbaha (warm chickpeas with tahini), bought from specialist shops in the early morning. Lunch at home might be kibbeh in its many shapes, shakriyeh (lamb cooked in yoghurt), yabraq (vine leaves stuffed with rice and meat) or mulukhiyah, a stew of jute leaves. Street food runs to shawarma, falafel and manakish flatbreads with thyme or cheese.

The Ghouta orchards supply apricots, pressed into sheets of qamar al-din paste that is dissolved into a drink for Ramadan, and the Damask rose, whose petals are distilled into rose water and which UNESCO listed in 2019 as Syrian intangible heritage. The Midan quarter is the likely birthplace of barazek, sesame biscuits often studded with pistachio, and Bakdash in the Hamidiyeh souk has pounded booza ice cream with pistachios since at least 1895.

In the south, the Hauran is wheat and lentil country, while Suwayda's highlands grow apples, grapes and figs. Street sellers in Damascus pour tamar hindi (tamarind) and jallab (a syrup of carob, dates, grape molasses and rose water) from brass jugs, and coffee is bitter, strong and flavoured with cardamom.

Old Damascus, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is the centre of the region. The Umayyad Mosque, with its gold mosaics of rivers and palaces and the shrine of John the Baptist inside, stands at the end of the covered Hamidiyeh souk, with the tomb of Saladin in a garden beside it. Straight Street runs east through the souks to Bab Sharqi, near the underground Chapel of Ananias in the Christian quarter, and the 18th-century Azem Palace and Khan As'ad Pasha stand nearby. Mount Qasioun rises above the modern city.

North of the capital in the Qalamoun, Maaloula climbs a cleft in the cliffs around the convent of Saint Thecla and the monastery of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, in a town fought over in 2013–14, and Saydnaya's convent of Our Lady stands on a rock above its town. Zabadani and Bloudan in the Anti-Lebanon were summer resorts for Damascenes.

South lies the Hauran, a plain of black basalt villages and grain fields. At Bosra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the 2nd-century Roman theatre survives nearly complete inside a fortress built around it from the 11th century and enlarged by the Ayyubids, with colonnaded streets, baths and an early mosque nearby. In the Druze highlands, Shahba keeps its Roman grid and mosaics, and Qanawat its temples among the trees. To the west, the Golan foothills rise towards Mount Hermon, and the ruins of Quneitra stand in the UN buffer zone beside the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights, held by Israeli forces since December 2024.