Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass

hill for miles around. As long as there has been an Aleppo, people sought refuge there whenever the invader came. The Arabs conquered it from the Byzantines only after sending a secret emissary inside to open the gates, and the Mongols succeeded in massacring the entire population when the Aleppins agreed to open the gates in exchange for Mongol assurances not to do any harm.

      Laundry hung drying on some of the roofs, and the sight of Aleppo near the Citadel had not changed since the first Poche had set foot there almost two centuries earlier.

      The rooftops, like the streets and souqs below, had a life all their own. Families could go from house to house, visiting cousins and uncles, without ever setting foot in the road. “This is what we call a belvedere,” he said, “in the Italian-Spanish style. It was my cousins’. They lived on the other side. It was above another khan. Every night, we used to go over the roof to see one another, to visit.” I looked at the other roofs. “The school, the house there, the other houses – they all belonged to your family?”

      “Yes,” he said, “but not that one. It was a Venetian house, but it became offices. And that is the Turkish bath. You can go there and have a nice bath.” Domes on the roof of the Hammam Nahaseen had small pieces of coloured glass embedded in them to filter sunlight to the bathers sweating below. “Before, when I was a child, there was a café on the roof of the baths. Every night, there was what we call in Aleppo a hakawati. That means a man who comes and tells stories. I remember it well from when I was a child. Now, the hakawati has completely disappeared. No one can do it anymore.”

      The hammam roof was bare, and the storyteller was gone, perhaps forever. The reason for his departure had less to do with politics than with the television antennae that sprouted from most of the houses like obstinate weeds.