Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
On our return to Aleppo, we were taken to visit an Assyrian artist, Yakob Ibrahim, a very
original Assyrian painter who charged $ 2,000 - 4,000 for his paintings. However, the
prices were outwith my very limited travelling budget, it was only the second day of my
trip, and it would not have been very practical to have a large painting to carry around with
me. I was shy about taking photos of his work, which would maybe have been inappropri-
ate, but I remember being struck by the bright, bold colours and interesting figurative com-
positions and it is easy to find his work on the internet, which confirms my initial impres-
sions of its originality. I hadn't come across Assyrians before. I was aware of the Assyrian
Empire but had assumed that it had gone the way of the Sumerians and Hittites. Since then,
I have met Assyrians from Iraq and Armenia and understand that they suffered a similar
fate to the Armenians between 1915 and 1920 in Turkey. While at Yakob's gallery, we met
Isa and Sarah (from Austria). Isa had taken some remarkable photos of a rare Sufi cere-
mony, which had been nine years in the planning. Thus, we had some fascinating glimpses
of the cultural diversity of this country.
That evening, we ate in the Al-Andalip Restaurant, near our hotel. It was a rooftop res-
taurant. We were shown into the lively kitchen, where we made our selection, which we
washed down with a bottle of tasty, local rosé wine.
One strange memory, which I have of Syria in the summer of 2005, was that all the vans,
buses and lorries (and possibly some cars) were fitted with the Lambada tune, which was
activated to warn other drivers and pedestrians when they were reversing. This incongru-
ous, sexy dance music from Brazil had been sold to all motor vehicles for the safety of
pedestrians, and I imagined the person who had sold this to the police traffic department
laughing all the way to the bank. I also had the strange vision of the culturally inappropriate
Lambada dances breaking out spontaneously in the streets every time a vehicle reversed.
The Lambada tune also brought back memories of my early days in wintry Poland, at the
end of the 1980s, just as Communism had fallen. At that time, this raunchy video of the
song was on every illegal satellite channel. At the same time, the local population would
buy the most outrageously bright shirts and clothes as a scream of liberation from the con-
formity of the past. Such clothes would look as extreme today as the big shoulder pads and
big hairdos of the eighties, but they were necessary at the time.
And so, we spent our last evening in Aleppo at the Baron Hotel. The restaurant did not ap-
pear to be in use in the evenings anymore, nor was it ever very busy. As we had a quiet beer
on the terrace, we imagined all the famous people who had previously stayed there in its
Presidential Suite including; President
Charles de Gaulle
,
King
Gustaf Adolf of Sweden
,
