Between the Bylines

by Doug Krikorian

  It was a coming-of-age experience for both of us during that long-ago summer in which the decision to go to New Orleans was an off-the-wall, spur-of-the-moment one inspired by nothing more than the thrilling prospect of going to a place that had a mystique to it. After all, we were two young guys who grew up in the dreary rural humdrum of the San Joaquin Valley, a sprawling expanse of grape vineyards and fruit trees that turned into a sweltering sauna during the summer months.

  I suspect I must have had a similar adventurous feeling on the Sunday morning of November 7, 1999, after reading an article on Syria written by Douglas Jehl in the travel section of the New York Times. In it, Jehl, who had been a correspondent for the Times based in Cairo, stated he had found traveling to Syria “to be the single most pleasant experience” he had during his stay in the Middle East.

  “It is a land of stunning variety—of geography, culture and, above all, of the relics left by those who over many centuries have battled for its control. Nowhere else in the region, perhaps nowhere else at all, can a visitor leap so effortlessly from one era to another—from Roman ruins to Crusader castles, from Mameluke mosques to Christian churches, from Ottoman caravanseries to primitive, creaking water wheels.” Jehl also wrote, “Anyone with a taste for the exotic and the old-fashioned will find Syria a wonderful antidote to the monotony brought on by globalization.”

  I knew Syria had just been taken off the State Department’s terrorism list after a long time on it and knew the country was a dictatorship under the iron-fisted rule of Hafez al-Assad. But I noticed that Jehl discussed the restaurants and thriving shops in the Armenian Quarter in what was then Syria’s second-largest city, Aleppo, and that he also revealed that he and his wife never felt threatened in Syria. I suddenly found myself smitten by the idea of visiting the country.

  I had Gillian read the story, and she, too, found it interesting.

  “Why don’t we go?” I said to her.

  “Why not?” she replied.

  It was a typical Gillian response. While she was strong-willed, she always was open-minded and almost always went along with my travel suggestions, although I would have understood had she not been keen about going to a repressive Middle Eastern country.

  When I broached the subject to friends and my parents, there wasn’t one who endorsed the idea.

  “Why would you want to go to a country where they stage public hangings at dawn?” asked Melvin Durslag, my old Herald Examiner mentor, summing up the general sentiment. “There are a lot nicer, if not safer, places to visit in the world than Syria.”

  Maybe so, but I had become intrigued by the prospect of going to a country whose self-imposed isolation had kept it immersed in another epoch in which there were no ATMs, no cellphones, no Internet.

  If Douglas Jehl, who worked for the almighty New York Times, found the place enchanting, why wouldn’t Gillian and I find it the same way?

  And so, after we obtained Syrian visas in Los Angeles, and after spending that Christmas with Gillian’s family in Hartlepool, we took a British Airways flight from London to Damascus on December 27, which took five hours and resulted in what became our most memorable vacation.

  Sadly, it also would be the final one, and I often have thought about such a development. Was it just a coincidence, or was it divine fate that our last foreign journey would become the most memorable one?

  There wasn’t a day that went by in Syria that wasn’t eventful, including even the three days of inactivity from my illness.

  Soon after we landed at the Damascus International Airport, I found out immediately that, indeed, we were in a country far different than I was accustomed to when a grim-faced soldier asked me what my profession was as he closely studied my passport.

  “Journalist,” I said.

  You would have thought I had said I was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood—an organization that at the time had been banned in Syria since 1982—as he loudly summoned an array of other officials. They took Gillian and me into a private room.

  It took more than a half hour of confused conversation, but I finally got through to a gentleman who spoke severely broken English that I was a journalist who wrote only about athletics and not about politics, which, obviously, had caused the initial alarm because we then were allowed to proceed hastily through customs.

  After we checked into the five-star Le Meridian in downtown Damascus in the early evening, we walked around the area for about an hour and came across machine gun–toting soldiers standing guard at almost every street corner and bearded men behind small carts pulled by donkeys navigating the streets alongside smoke-belching old cars. There was an endless maze of ancient stone buildings, as well as mosques and churches and courtyards and small, winding alleys. We felt that we had stepped into a time capsule that took us back two thousand years.

  Gillian and Doug dining in a Damascus restaurant.

  We also saw a lot of men standing idly around the streets, and I noticed a lot of them kept their gaze on Gillian

  “Why are all those guys staring at me?” wondered Gillian. “They just won’t stop.”

  “I guess because they’ve never seen anyone as attractive as you,” I quipped. “Gillian, I really don’t know. It’s kind of strange.”

  We’d find out later from the female concierge at the Le Meridian that men in a Muslim country like Syria weren’t accustomed to seeing women in jeans that highlighted their derrieres—at least they weren’t in Damascus in December 1999.

  The concierge directed us that evening to one of Damascus’s top restaurants, Zeitouna, and we had a large meal that included a mezze (small dishes of food preceding the main course), a muhammara (hot pepper dip used on bread) and then a hearty plate of lamb kebobs, chicken and fish. Also included in the feast that stuffed us was a Lebanese bottle of red wine and a rich Syrian dessert called kanafe, made of ricotta and shredded filo dough and enhanced by fragrant syrup. Although neither of us smoked, we took a few puffs from a water pipe—it’s called a narghile—that was at every table in the restaurant.

  While the dinner turned out to be a challenging gastronomical experience—it must have taken us nearly an hour and a half to consume our vast amount of food—the most startling development came when the waiter brought the check. The Syrian lira we were charged was equivalent to $35. Such a meal would have been over $200 at a similar restaurant in America.

  The next morning, we took a cab up to the nearby Al-Qalmoun Mountains. Rising about 4,500 feet above sea level, nestled in a quiet highland lap, is a hamlet called Maalula in which stone houses tower above one another like a series of terraces, with their rooftops serving as corridors and causeways for foot movement around the area. Most of the buildings have been chiseled out of the rock of the mountainous façade, and there is an unreal quality to the entire setting. It is a historic place dating back more than 2,500 years and the only surviving one where Jesus’s dialect, Aramaic, still is spoken.

  That afternoon, we visited the famous Al Hamidiyah Souq, a covered bazaar filled with customers that extends for almost a quarter of a mile. It was like an ancient Walmart—some shoppers rode donkeys—and every product imaginable was available. The prices were incredibly cheap, although one must be adept at bartering.

  The exit is at the historic Umayyad Mosque, one of the largest and oldest mosques in the world and considered one of the four holiest places in Islam. It also is the place were many religious historians believe the head of John the Baptist is buried, and the tomb of Saladin stands in a small garden adjoining the north wall of the mosque. In order to tour it, Gillian had to wear a hijab that covered her head.

  I’ve often told people it’s indescribable what we experienced daily on that Syrian vacation, during which we did not once come across an American.

  After a couple days in Damascus, we hired a driver to take us to Aleppo, which had a sizable Armenian colony. We took our time during the 223-mile trip, stopping on several occasions on the Damascus–Aleppo highway.


  Once we pulled over on a desolate stretch of the journey when we came across a Bedouin herding his sheep on the side of the road in a scene that I’m sure had been going on in the country since biblical times. The Bedouin, his head covered by a red keffiyeh, was quite friendly and allowed both Gillian and me to pick up one of the lambs.

  We stopped at one small village, and many of its inhabitants—including a lot of children—trailed us around. A few of its elders took us up a steep hill that overlooked a vast valley, and I remember thinking idly to myself as we stood there near the edge that we easily could have been pushed over the precipice or even been kidnapped.

  Of course, our driver was with us, and Syria, at that time, was still under the firm control of Hafez al-Assad; it was not the turbulent, bloody, strife-ridden country it has become in recent times.

  One of the elders even invited us into his hut with his family, where Gillian and I sat on a mat and were served cups of tea. We were having a wonderful time, until the patriarch brought out a bunch of worthless jewelry and tried vainly to persuade me to purchase some of it.

  Finally, after about ten minutes, I angrily got up and informed our driver, who had accompanied us, that it was time to go. We did, but that didn’t exactly deter the guy from continuing to try to beseech me to buy his ersatz items. In fact, as our cabbie drove us out of the village, that patriarch and three of his pals got on motor scooters and sped alongside us, motioning wildly for us to pull over.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!” I shrieked at our driver, whose driving I thought suddenly had become too timorous.

  The scene was downright comical—those of a certain age might compare it to a chase in the old Keystone Kops silent films—although I reacted strongly when I noticed that Gillian had become wary.

  Chapter 32

  We made it safely out of there—I doubt we were in serious danger—and soon went through two cities, Homs and Hama, that have been at the forefront of the uprising against the Bashar al-Assad regime.

  We took a detour near Homs to one of the country’s most famous sites, the Cras de Chevaliers, a Crusader castle of medieval engineering mastery set among rolling green hills.

  And when we drove through Hama, I noticed a lot of the structures still were pockmarked by bullet holes, a leftover from 1982, when Hafez al-Assad brutally suppressed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising in which it’s been estimated that as many as twenty thousand people were killed.

  We finally arrived in Aleppo at about 5:00 p.m., checked into our hotel, the Beit Wakil, and began prowling the streets, which were clogged with cars, all of which seemed to be honking. I’d have to say Aleppo was the loudest city I’ve ever visited—New York is a funeral parlor in comparison!—and maybe the busiest, as its sidewalks also were jammed with people.

  We had a tasty dinner that evening at a place called the Sissi House and the next day walked into an auditorium adjoining an Armenian church down the street from our hotel where a young troupe of dancers was practicing its routines.

  One of the dancers, a slim, pretty nineteen-year-old lady whose first name was Litty, came over during a break and spoke to us in halting English.

  When she discovered my father was Armenian, she became extraordinarily excited and immediately invited Gillian and me to have dinner at her parents’ home the following night and also said that she’d show us around Aleppo.

  And that’s what Litty did the next day as she escorted us up to the Citadel, a huge ancient fortress perched on a massif overlooking the city, and also took us to the stone-covered souk that was jammed with people and through a maze of alleys brimming with various merchants and craftsmen.

  That evening, we had an exquisite Armenian meal of pilaf, lamb kebobs and kufta with Litty’s parents and brother, and I remember asking her father how it was being a Christian family in a Muslim society.

  “We have no problems with the Muslims because Hafez al-Assad won’t tolerate any harassment of Christians,” he said. “The word is that al-Assad’s life was saved a long time ago by an Armenian doctor, and he always has treated Armenians well.”

  I also remember the fellow making a chilling revelation when I asked him if the large Armenian colony in Aleppo would feel threatened if the al-Assad regime was uprooted.

  “The Armenians are well armed this time and won’t be sacrificial lambs like they were in Turkey,” he said, referring to the 1915 Armenian genocide in Eastern Turkey in which an estimated 1.5 Armenians were murdered.

  I think back to that statement now in light of the turbulence that has raged in Syria in recent times and wonder how the Armenians and other Christian minorities will fare in its aftermath amid all the violent chaos.

  After dinner, Litty’s brother drove us back to the Beit Wakil, and as we had a nightcap in the hotel’s bar, I suddenly felt faint and weak and began perspiring.

  “I think I’m getting a temperature,” I told Gillian.

  Within a short time, I was sprawled out in my hotel bed and was burning up. We had a thermometer, and when Gillian took my temperature, the reading on it was a frightening 105.

  “Food poisoning,” I muttered. “I read in the brochures about Syria that foreigners have to be very careful what they eat.”

  “We’ve got to get you to a hospital,” said Gillian.

  “No,” I said.

  I don’t recall much after that. The raging fever put me in a state of delirium, although I do remember having awful nausea and hallucinatory dreams. In fact, as I compose these words, I’ve become slightly nauseous remembering that scary night. Gillian later told me she kept my face swathed in cold cloths and that I refused her persistent attempts to call a doctor. Blessedly, the fever went down by the next morning—it had dropped to one hundred—but we decided to curtail our stay in Aleppo and return to Damascus. We once again hired a taxicab driver at the usual fee—$100—and I slept in the backseat of his car during the journey, which was interrupted every sixty miles by military roadblocks.

  I recuperated at the Meridian and never left the hotel the next couple of days, as I either was in my room sleeping or watching TV or checking out the goings-on down in the lobby that always had the same five or six guys in suits seated on the chairs and couches (I later found out from the friendly concierge that they were members of Haffez al-Assad’s intelligence apparatus).

  I did find it irritating to be awakened prematurely early in the mornings by a loud chanting that was broadcast over loudspeakers that could be heard throughout Damascus. It was the Islamic call to prayer—it’s called the adhan—by the muezzin, and it kept reverberating in my head long after I had departed the city.

  Gillian and I were in our hotel room when the new millennium arrived, and we opened the window and looked out at the city, which surprised me by its relative quietness. Oh, I heard some shouting and cheering, but this wasn’t like those raucous other New Year’s celebrations we had experienced in Berlin and Cannes and New York. Quite subdued.

  I felt strong enough on January 2 to be on the move again, and we hired a cabbie to drive us to Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, which was only fifty miles from Damascus.

  At the border, when the Lebanese custom officials noticed on my Syrian papers that I was a journalist and broadcaster, there once again was a volatile commotion, as there had been at the Syrian airport.

  Our driver, an amiable, talkative chap named Muhammad, patiently explained that I reported on sports, not politics. But it didn’t seem to make an impact, as the guy in charge kept shaking his head vehemently as both Gillian and I stood there in frustration, not knowing quite what to do.

  Finally, Muhammad whispered in my ear, “Give me forty dollars in American money, and you’ll get through.”

  Soon, we were on our way to Beirut, although we did stop an hour in Anjar, a small town settled by Armenian refugees in 1939. They hailed from the eastern Turkey area of Musa Dagh, which became internationally famous after Franz Werfel’s 1933 bestseller, Forty Days of Musa Dagh, told of the
heroic survival of a small group of Armenians in that mountainous enclave during the Armenian genocide in 1915.

  As we drove up the hillside through the villages leading into Beirut, I couldn’t help but notice that every mosque and church still bore the ugly scars from the Lebanese Civil War that raged for fifteen years and had been over for almost a decade.

  And once we made it into downtown Beirut, it seemed as though every building also still displayed the ravages of that terrible conflict in which there were more than 1 million casualties—an estimated 200,000 deaths—and another 350,000 people who were permanently displaced.

  While I never feared for my safety in Syria, I didn’t feel the same way during my brief visit to Beirut, perhaps because the city was swarming with rifle-toting soldiers in the wake of a morning assassination of a Russian envoy by a pair of Chechen terrorists. On a couple of tense occasions, as we drove slowly through the battered city, soldiers ordered our driver to stop the car. They checked our travel documents with grim-faced vigilance, and I noticed their guns always seemed to be aimed in our direction.

  “Douglas, I don’t like it here,” said Gillian after the final time we were pulled over.

  “I don’t either,” I said as we drove past the battered remains of the old Holiday Inn.

  We stayed in Beirut for about five hours, and our driver took us by the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp that was notorious for a massacre that took place there in 1982, as well as in the nearby Sabra. The place was a ghetto teeming with people, and a large regiment of soldiers surrounded it.

  On the way back to Damascus, we stopped at a small café off the highway for tea, and Gillian and I quickly noticed that the other customers in the place—all males—were regarding us with unnerving scowls.

  “I think we should go,” I said to Muhammad.

  He nodded.

  In the car later, he said, “I’m glad we got out of there. I think those guys staring at us belong to Hezbollah. They don’t like Americans because of your country’s relationship with Israel.”