DAMASCUS IN 1851.
No city has been more variously described than Damascus, because none has more contrasted features. A spruce Yankee, hearing “Silk Buckingham’s” description of his “Paradise,” and seeing merely narrow, half-paved, mat-covered streets, and dirty, mud-walled buildings, would prefer his native “Slabtown” to the “most refreshing scene in all our travels.” And yet Damascus is one of the wonders of the world, unrivalled in what is peculiarly its own, admitting no comparison with any existing city, revelling in a beauty and a splendor belonging to Islamism more than Christianity, characterizing the age of the Caliphs rather than of the Crystal Palace.
In antiquity it has no rival. Nineveh, Babylon, Palmyra, its contemporaries, have wholly perished; while this oldest inhabited place has lost none of its population, yielded none of its local preëminence, abandoned but one of the arts for which it was so renowned, and taken not a tinge of European thought, worship, life. It numbers not far from one hundred and fifty thousand souls, of whom twenty thousand may be Greek and Armenian Christians. It lies in an exquisite garden at the foot of Anti-Lebanon, in a plain of inexhaustible fertility, watered by innumerable brooklets from those ancient streams “Abana and Pharphar,” and shut in by vast groves of walnut and poplar, a “verdurous wall of Paradise,” which are all that the traveller sees for hours as he draws near the city of “Abraham’s steward.”
Originally the seat of a renowned kingdom, and once the capital of the Saracen empire, it is now the centre of an Ottoman Pashalik, but virtually the metropolis of Syria, as it was in the earliest time. Miss Martineau and some others carelessly give it a length of seven miles; but the real extent of the city-walls in any one direction is not more than two. The gardens and groves around, however, take the same name, and are over twenty miles in circuit, of a studied, picturesque wildness, shaded lanes, running side by side with merry brooks, the whole overshadowed by the deepest forest, and forming delicious relief from the sunburnt plains of Syria. Besides the walnut, so much prized for its fruit all through the East, and the poplar, the main dependence for building, the famous damson, or Damascene plum, abounds the citron, orange, and pomegranate spread their fruit around the vine is everywhere seen, and only three miles off stands the forest of damask rose-trees whence the most delicious attar is made. But a genuine American will prefer the walnut-tree to all others, because of its freedom of growth, massiveness of trunk, depth of shade, and impressive reminiscence of home. These trees, together with the mulberry, do very much for the commerce of the city. But, indeed, Damascus is the chief depot of manufactures for Syria. Silk goods cannot be bought to such advantage elsewhere, nor of such antique patterns, nor of genuine “damask” colors. The business has suffered somewhat of late, because Turkish husbands discovering that English prints are so much cheaper, and their wives fancying the flowing calicoes to be so much prettier than the patterns which their grandmothers wore, foreign goods are supplanting the domestic; and a macadamized road is contemplated from the city to its seaport Beiroot, whose effect would be to make British and French manufactures still more common, but, at the same time, to give free circulation to the handicraft of Damascus. As at Constantinople, Cairo, and elsewhere, each trade occupies its own quarter, the jewellers, pipe-makers, silk-dealers, grocers, saddlers, having each their exclusive neighborhood; none of the Bazars are such noble edifices as cluster around the mosque of St. Sophia; and in the rainy season (that is, during their winter) the pavement is so wretched and slippery, and such a mass of mud and water oozes down from the rotten awnings, that one does no justice to the unequalled richness of some of the fabrics and the grandeur of some of the khans. One traveller informs the public that there is a grand “Bazar for wholesale business” of variegated black and white marble, “surmounted by an ample dome,” with a lively fountain in the centre. There are thirty-one such buildings, which we should call Exchanges, bearing each the name of the Sultan who erected them. Those that I visited were contiguous to the only street which wears a name in the East, and that name, familiar to us in the book of Acts, “Strait,” Dritto, as your guide mumbles the word, a long avenue containing the only hotel in the city.
An oriental peculiarity which makes the large towns exceedingly interesting is, that every occupation is carried on out of doors, and right under your eyes as you stroll along. Here the silk web is stretched upon the outside wall of some extended building; here the butcher is dressing the meat, perhaps for your dinner, right upon the sidewalk; and here a sort of extempore sausage is cooking, so that one might almost eat it as he walks, a capital idea for hasty eaters, and a very nice article in its way. There is no other part of the world where so much cooking is to be seen all the while, and such loads of sweetmeats gladden the eyes of childhood, and such luscious compounds, scented with attar, spread temptation before every sense. The business of “El-Shans” might almost be headed by the five hundred public bakers, though the silk is still the principal manufacture, and there are reported to be seven hundred and forty-eight dealers in damask, thirty-four silk-winders, one hundred silk dyers, and one hundred and forty-three weavers of the same article.
The famous Damascus blades are nothing but an “antiquity” now,—they are uniformly called so by the people, were offered to our purchase in very small quantities by persons who knew nothing of their manufacture, at exorbitant prices, and in very uncouth forms. They appeared to be curiosities to them, as they certainly were to us, and are said to be sometimes manufactured in England. A mace, offered for sale among these scimetars of wavy steel, smacked of the Crusaders’ time, and was richly inlaid with gold; the fire-arms, or blunderbusses, were grotesque and unwieldy, richly mounted, and gorgeously ornamented.
An attempt is making in certain quarters to persuade the civilized world that Turkey has still some military power. Of this almost imperial city the citadel is but a mass of ruins. Count Guyon, a confederate general with Kossuth, and now a Turkish Pasha and drill-officer, assured us it would be repaired and strengthened; but the city-walls offer no defence against a modern army; and the Turkish soldier, notwithstanding his courage and endurance, cannot be bastinadoed into military science; neither have educated Christian officers, like Guyon, any real influence. I frequently saw the sentinels asleep while upon duty, and recent experience has proved them incapable of standing before a far smaller amount of really trained troops. Some of the barracks at Damascus are rather the finest which the Sultan possesses, and among the best in the world,—some, too, of the military exercises are pursued with a creditable zeal,—but, on the whole, a more slatternly corps of men was never seen, nor one less confident in themselves.