Memories of Aleppo

The Syrian city of Aleppo has been in ruins for years, due to incessant warfare. Bittersweet memories, like Hazem Darwiesh's, are then so important to keep the historic city alive. Despite the nightmares that continue to haunt him, he loves to tell about his beloved Aleppo, a lost piece of history in the form of a destroyed city.

My grandmother's stone cupboard

Over the past few weeks, I often woke up at night in the wolf hour, the last hour of the night, trying to control all my dreams and nightmares. My dreams took me back to the winter room in my old grandmother's house in Aleppo. There I am standing in front of her stone cupboard.

The cupboard is only modest; it only has room for a small colour TV, a sewing box, a sewing machine, a biscuit box, a chocolate bar and a few other knickknacks. In front of it hangs a white lace curtain, which only goes up when we watch television with grandma in the winter evenings, or listen to her stories about Aleppo, its people and its history.

My grandmother recounts Aleppo evocatively, with love but also nostalgia. Every time I return there in my mind. Then I see it through the eyes of the child who imagines the city as told by her. I compare those images with the other Aleppo I knew as a child myself, with the streets between school and home. Always my grandmother's Aleppo is more beautiful. I wish I had lived in those days.

Aleppo slips away

In the years I grew up, the gap between the old and the new city grew wider and wider. And no matter how we tried to hold on to our love for the old cityscape with its customs and its special character, Aleppo slipped further out of our hands every day.

Aleppo never leaves me. I keep seeing my city in all the little things of the new world around me. But why did I wake up every night the other night with memories of that stone cabinet? A cupboard that may no longer exist; in a city forgotten by the world?

The loss of Jerusalem

When Donald Trump decided last December to recognise Jerusalem as Israel's capital, Arab social media was filled with emotional expressions of grief and anger over his decision. Many mourn the loss of Jerusalem, their holy city, their rights and history.

We Arabs often react quickly and emotionally. But often such a reaction also ebbs away quickly without leaving any real impact. But I was surprised that I myself felt nothing at Trump's decision, however sacred Jerusalem is to me as a believing Arab. On the contrary, Jerusalem still exists while our Aleppo has been wiped out.

Wave of anger

When I look back in time, I see a much longer wave of subcutaneous anger about this in myself. Like so many of my fellow city-dwellers, who have experienced so much resentment and pain in recent years. Who cares about Aleppo, our home that has been systematically destroyed and forgotten for decades? Forgotten up to and including its latest defeat, a year ago. What has become of its history, its people and its culture? Wasn't the occupation of Aleppo under the Assad regime actually far worse than Israel's occupation of East Jerusalem and its recognition as its capital?

I found myself returning to that distant stone closet in Aleppo, full of objects from our millennia-old culture, systematically destroyed by the Assad regime over 40 years. I returned to my grandmother; she taught us the history of our city, its main inhabitants and its secrets. While at school and through the media, we only learned about Jerusalem and the ‘Great Cause of the Liberation of Palestine’, with the hidden aim that we Alepponians would forget our identity.

My grandmother guarded our identity. She told us - with fear in her eyes - about the black days of the 1980s. When the government soldiers invaded homes, looted, rounded up people, tortured and killed them, on the pretext that they wanted to eliminate the Muslim Brotherhood. But their real aim was to break the resistance of Aleppo and its people once and for all. That was the face of a ruthless regime.

Pearl in decline

Until the late nineteenth century, Aleppo was one of the world's urban gems. It was prosperous, socially rich and its political influence covered a wide area. Strategically located on the Silk Road between the Mediterranean Sea and the Urfa (Euphrates), it was - after Istanbul and Cairo - the third trading city of the Ottoman Empire. But the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869 shifted trade between Asia and Europe to the sea. Since then, the economic luster of the city and its environs has faded and its social structure also fell into decline. This decline was further accelerated when Aleppo was assigned to the French protectorate of Syria after World War I and lost direct contact with the Mediterranean Sea as the port city of Antioch became Turkish

When Syria became an independent republic after World War II, Aleppo tried in vain to regain some of its former influence. But it failed and increasingly suffered from the policies of its old rival Damascus, the capital of the new republic.

The Assad regime

In 1971, Hafez- Al-Assad, the father of current ruler Bashar Al-Assad, came to power as president of Syria. From the first moment, he started excluding Alepponians from important positions in the lower government, ministries and the army. More and more, the city came under the direct control of people from the Assad regime.

The oppressive 1980s, with the raids against the Muslim Brotherhood, were the first low point. But things could be worse. The latest war, from 2012 to now, has allowed the current Assad regime to drive people out of Aleppo and surrounding towns and take over the area almost entirely. A complete occupation by this foreign, Syrian power to us. A total subjugation of people, who are tired of war and no longer have the courage to resist b

Until the city returns

In the past, we had been denied the right to say out loud that we were occupied.

But the story is much bigger than that of a despotic regime and an oppressed people. It is apparently easier to mobilise Arab people to protest against the occupation of East Jerusalem, than against the occupation of their own, once at least as glorious, Aleppo. While Aleppo remains close and sleeping under occupation. And Jerusalem is far away, like the stone cupboard in my dreams. We will continue to tell the stories of our grandmothers until the city returns to us, its people.

 For this article, he received help from investigative journalist Michel Robles. Previously published on history magazine http://www.geschiedenismagazine.nl/nieuws/278-herinneringen-aan-aleppo

Image: CC BY-NC 2.0 (via Flickr)