The Lost City: Homage to Aleppo
From ‘After Aleppo,’ Jehan Bseiso, 14.1.15
There is no greater nor more harrowing drama on our watch, than the slow death of the great city of Aleppo.
Jan Egeland, Norwegian Refugee Council, 2015
In the hills around Aleppo the wild grasses that homo sapiens first cultivated twelve millennia ago still bear seed; except now they’re springing up amongst the rubble of a fallen city. According to Francesca Borri, a journalist who lived through two years of relentless bombardment: ‘Aleppo is nothing but rubble.’
One of the earliest of human settlements on the River Queiq, the city we know as Aleppo expanded into a major trading centre thanks to its commanding position on the old Silk Road. In Arabic, its name is Halab, meaning ‘milk’ – here, so legend goes, the patriarch Abraham gave milk from his cow to needy locals. Remains of a structure dating back to 3000 BCE, possibly a temple for the storm god Hadad, have been unearthed on Aleppo’s Citadel Hill, older than other ruins dating back to the era of Greek occupation, following Alexander’s conquest in 333 BCE.
Aleppo’s ancient monuments have been heritage listed: the old city became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1986. But now, after the years of war and aerial bombing, with no heed taken of UNESCO’s warnings, most have been destroyed.
Thousands of ordinary homes are also lost: unit blocks, hostels and boarding houses, and traditional dwellings which typified the ‘elegance of a Syrian home, the carpets, the rose-filled courtyards and pastel painted tiles, the wrought iron lamps – you have to have seen all that, of which nothing remains but photographs on cell phones …to understand the hopelessness of this regression to the Stone Age.’
No words of sympathy can be adequate; there is no earthly way to console those who mourn Aleppo and its people.
