New Threat to the Old City of Damascus?
HT: Indigo Jo
Damascus: A Plan to Destroy Paradise by Rana Kabbani
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UPDATE: I located the source for the original story at the BBC website here. Even though it appears that there IS in fact some bad plan to widen a road, some of the specific claims of the Islamica article I could not verify. I still have my doubts that the plan will ever go forward. In the meantime, I find it ridiculous that they think they can “ease traffic flow” anywhere NEAR the Old City. I’m sorry but if Venice can do just fine without cars, so can the Old City of Damascus. The fact that somebody is considering demolishing history, culture, architecture, graves, masajid, and everything else just to fit in automobile traffic is maddeningly short sighted. Most Syrians don’t own cars anyway. Only the elites do. I’m stopping now….
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As others have pointed out, there is very little evidence in this article to support the claims made. Most of the article is, as one person on the Syria Comment blog said, “romanticism” about old Damascus.
I understand where the author is coming from, though. As her family homes are located in the areas believed to be under threat, it probably means that her family is being pressured to sell their homes and are being told that these are the plans in the works. Like others, I too have a lot of doubt about whether these plans will actually be carried out. My MIL has been told for at least 8 years that the entire block of her apartment building in another part of the city was going to be leveled for new construction and that she would get some kind of compensation for it. Well, it never happened. Then again, as I mentioned over at Indigo Jo’s, with 1.5 million Iraqi refugees living in and around Damascus, real estate prices in Damascus have literally tripled in the past 5 years. Dh’s family’s next door neighbors have been pressuring my in-laws to sell their shares of their houses together in yet a third part of the city to a developer. It seems suspicious and unlikely to me because both houses are deep inside a Hara (not close to a main street) and would be useless to a developer unless they could buy up the entire Hara. But most of the people in Syria are so poor that when you tempt them with such outrageously high real estate prices, many people are drooling at the idea of selling. Many contemplate a life in the cheap suburbs– years ago I met a sister from a well-off family from part of the Old City who had sold their bayt arabi “to buy three apartments in the suburbs”. !!!
What Sr. Rana Kabbani does not mention in her article is that this is not the first time there has been a threat to the Old City, and the last time (I believe in the ’70s) there was a big uproar over it, including major controvery over the way the renovations were undertaken on the Omayyad Mosque. There has been such a movement to preserve the old houses of Damascus, at least within the Old City walls, that I can’t imagine that any plans will be allowed to slip by unnoticed. Now if your house is outside the Old City walls (like ours is) that’s another story.
I also can’t imagine that Iranian pilgrims (who flood Damascus every summer) are considered a more important tourist population than the Western tourists Syria is trying harder and harder to attract. The Western tourists want to see the Old City and its houses and architecture. Unfortunately, attracting Western and other non-religious tourists has resulted in the placement of alcohol establishments right outside the door of the Omayyad Mosque. In some ways I guess I should be at least a little happy that they are willing to court the Western tourists with alcohol because it likely means that the international pressure to save the Old City for the tourists with more money to spend will overcome any pressure to accommodate Iranian tourists who doubtless are probably not such big spenders.
Maybe people are pressuring Sr. Rana’s family to sell their houses not because of any development plans but because they want to take the houses and make them into motels and restaurants (many of the old houses are being converted for these uses) and they are being told a story of imminent destruction only as a scare tactic to pressure them.