Read Online In Xanadu by William Dalrymple - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: William Dalrymple
Tags: Travel, Non-Fiction
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key to understanding Aleppo. Profit; the previous year in Damascus I had heard the Aleppans described as bourgeois merchantmen; a Damascus funeral was said to be more fun than an Aleppo wedding. Now, compared with the busy, teeming streets of Damascus, the rows of smart merchants' houses did seem somehow stuffy and respectable.
The monumental architecture of the town seemed to reflect this. The Ummayad mosque and the citadel were two of the finest buildings that we saw in the East, but there was a utilitarian spirit about them that distinguished them from the run of Islamic buildings. There was none of the luxuriant frivolity of Damascus, none of the foppish gaiety and colour of Isfahan.
Superficially the Ummayad mosque does resemble that in Damascus. Both were built in the eighth century, and they share the same open-court plan, like a Cambridge college; the same prayer-hall with a nave and two transepts and a square minaret that is really a church tower. All this is an inheritance from the pre-Islamic tradition of Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture, except that the mihrab is in the south wall, so that prayers face the long side of the rectangle, not the narrow. Yet the Aleppo mosque is a much more stern building than that in Damascus. There are no mosaics, no arabesque fantasies, no kufic inscriptions. The only decoration is a simple inlay pattern in black marble in the courtyard floor - something St Bernard allowed even in his Cistercian monasteries. But where Cistercian simplicity was born of austerity, one suspects that in Aleppo it was born of economy. 'Why should we have mosaics?' one can hear the merchants ask. 'How much do they cost?' I don't think we can afford Corinthian capitals.' So it is. There are no mosaics; the capitals are plain. Even the carpets look cheap.
The citadel is also puritanical in spirit, but here the restraint is informed not so much by meanness as by a strict functionalism. It is a vast, totalitarian mass of mustard-coloured masonry, with totalitarian qualities - simplicity, scale and symmetry - like the Fascist architecture of Italy, or the Stalinist architecture of Soviet Russia. It is the building of a megalomaniac, awesome and unassailable, all towers and walls, with a mountain for its glacis and a pair of fortresses as its gates.
Less threatening but equally disturbing is a tomb in the gatehouse. Passing through a maze of dog-leg turns, gates and portcullises you come to a gloomy hall with a large wasps' nest in the vaulting. There, raised on a dais, covered with flowers and offerings and swamped by layer upon layer of rustling, kufic-encrusted silk, lies one of the two reputed bodies of the patron saint of England (the other is at Ramleh near Jerusalem). Quite what St George is doing in either place I have been unable to discover.
The history of Aleppo is terrible stuff: a long succession of massacres and sieges disappearing into the mists of Syrian prehistory. First held by the Hittites, it was captured in turn by the Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Persians (again), Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols and Ottomans, each of whom vied to outdo the carnage of their predecessors. The Assyrians were the most imaginatively sadistic: they impaled the town's menfolk on their spears and feasted for two days while their victims groaned to a slow death.
In between invasions Aleppo was ruled by a succession of aristocratic thugs who exacted outrageous taxes and perfected ingenious ways of bankrupting their burghers.
In all the town's history there are only two cheering anecdotes. The first tells of the Arabs who captured Aleppo by dressing up as goats and nibbling their way into the city; the second concerns Abraham, who is supposed to have milked his cow on the citadel's summit. It is not much in ten thousand years of history, especially when the one story ends in a massacre (after the Arabs killed the guards and opened the city gates to their friends) and
The monumental architecture of the town seemed to reflect this. The Ummayad mosque and the citadel were two of the finest buildings that we saw in the East, but there was a utilitarian spirit about them that distinguished them from the run of Islamic buildings. There was none of the luxuriant frivolity of Damascus, none of the foppish gaiety and colour of Isfahan.
Superficially the Ummayad mosque does resemble that in Damascus. Both were built in the eighth century, and they share the same open-court plan, like a Cambridge college; the same prayer-hall with a nave and two transepts and a square minaret that is really a church tower. All this is an inheritance from the pre-Islamic tradition of Byzantine ecclesiastical architecture, except that the mihrab is in the south wall, so that prayers face the long side of the rectangle, not the narrow. Yet the Aleppo mosque is a much more stern building than that in Damascus. There are no mosaics, no arabesque fantasies, no kufic inscriptions. The only decoration is a simple inlay pattern in black marble in the courtyard floor - something St Bernard allowed even in his Cistercian monasteries. But where Cistercian simplicity was born of austerity, one suspects that in Aleppo it was born of economy. 'Why should we have mosaics?' one can hear the merchants ask. 'How much do they cost?' I don't think we can afford Corinthian capitals.' So it is. There are no mosaics; the capitals are plain. Even the carpets look cheap.
The citadel is also puritanical in spirit, but here the restraint is informed not so much by meanness as by a strict functionalism. It is a vast, totalitarian mass of mustard-coloured masonry, with totalitarian qualities - simplicity, scale and symmetry - like the Fascist architecture of Italy, or the Stalinist architecture of Soviet Russia. It is the building of a megalomaniac, awesome and unassailable, all towers and walls, with a mountain for its glacis and a pair of fortresses as its gates.
Less threatening but equally disturbing is a tomb in the gatehouse. Passing through a maze of dog-leg turns, gates and portcullises you come to a gloomy hall with a large wasps' nest in the vaulting. There, raised on a dais, covered with flowers and offerings and swamped by layer upon layer of rustling, kufic-encrusted silk, lies one of the two reputed bodies of the patron saint of England (the other is at Ramleh near Jerusalem). Quite what St George is doing in either place I have been unable to discover.
The history of Aleppo is terrible stuff: a long succession of massacres and sieges disappearing into the mists of Syrian prehistory. First held by the Hittites, it was captured in turn by the Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Persians (again), Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols and Ottomans, each of whom vied to outdo the carnage of their predecessors. The Assyrians were the most imaginatively sadistic: they impaled the town's menfolk on their spears and feasted for two days while their victims groaned to a slow death.
In between invasions Aleppo was ruled by a succession of aristocratic thugs who exacted outrageous taxes and perfected ingenious ways of bankrupting their burghers.
In all the town's history there are only two cheering anecdotes. The first tells of the Arabs who captured Aleppo by dressing up as goats and nibbling their way into the city; the second concerns Abraham, who is supposed to have milked his cow on the citadel's summit. It is not much in ten thousand years of history, especially when the one story ends in a massacre (after the Arabs killed the guards and opened the city gates to their friends) and
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