Damascus unfolded before me like a venerable tapestry of time and color. High on the plane’s descent I caught a first glimmer of golden stone minarets piercing the blue sky, as if a centuries‑old melody were being retuned for my ears alone. The air in the Valley of Barada was warm with the scent of jasmine and rose – for Damascus is “the City of Jasmine,” as the great poet Nizar Qabbani calls it, named for the fragrant blooms that perfume its evenings . Even the rose itself carries the city’s name: the famed Rosa damascena, the Damask rose, wafts its petals into soaps and perfumes far beyond Syria’s borders, a scent I remember from my childhood workshops in Tehran. Here, too, each autumn brings a jasmine festival, where families exchange sweet-smelling blooms in celebration of the city’s floral spirit . Nothing marks the timelessness of Damascus more than knowing it is one of the oldest continually inhabited cities on earth . Stone and story accumulate here like layers of silk in an ancient loom, and even as I stepped onto its streets I felt the weight of centuries pressing lightly on my shoulders.
Walking its alleys, I moved like a pilgrim on a sacred circuit. Alleyways in the Old City are narrow and sunken, flanked by towering mud-brick and stone houses whose latticed mashrabiya windows seem to gaze upon me as a stranger might be gazed upon by ancestors. My hands brushed the cool plaster walls as I passed under archways dressed in curling vines. Above me, a tangle of light and shadow played across my path. In corners of the souk a street vendor invited travelers with steaming cups of cardamom coffee and gold-spun Arabic sweets. Damascus’s Old City, founded millennia ago, was the medieval heart of a flourishing craft industry – the very culture of making things by hand lives here in every mosaic frieze and embroidered shawl I encountered. Different quarters still specialize in their trades: cloth weavers in one lane, silversmiths in another, bakers and spice dealers at the junctions. I remembered that in Shahriar’s poetry of long ago, our own Persian bazaars had a similar magic – and I began to sense why Damascus is sometimes called the womb that taught poets poetry, as Qabbani once wrote .
The Great Umayyad Mosque rose unexpectedly through a break in the alleys – a vast green courtyard and golden dome edged by cedar and sandalwood inlaid woodwork. Its walls glowed in pale ochre mosaics, the remnants of paradise painted above the olive of prayer. Here is Islam’s history etched in stone: this “Great Mosque of Damascus,” built by the Umayyad caliphs, is the oldest surviving mosque made of stone in the world . I remembered the account of Caliph al-Walīd I, who added “a fifth” blessing to Damascus along with her climate, her flowing waters, her fruits and her baths – that blessing, he said, is this mosque . In the prayer hall I pressed my palm to one of its 1,500-year-old columns and felt the centuries vibrate, the way the Persian poets claim that rugs and wood carry the breath of old conversations. Nearby, the modest tomb of Saladin still draws pilgrims to its marble casing – a reminder that this city witnessed the Crusaders’ coming and the courage of the Muslim world. Through all that history the Damascus stone kept building: behind the mosque I saw the pointed arches of the Caravanserai and the long covered colonnade of the Al-Hamidiyah Souq.
At midday I threaded my way into Al-Hamidiyah Souq, the vast covered bazaar that links the Citadel to the mosque plaza. Inside, the early sunlight pierced the patched iron roof in shafts of brilliance, illuminating kiosks piled high with spices, fabrics, lanterns and perfume bottles. The souq arches – dating back to the Ottoman refurbishments of the 19th century – echoed softly with chants and conversations. I found myself in a corridor of textile merchants: bolts of silk and velvet hanging in layers of turquoise, crimson and gold. Centuries-old techniques are still honored here, for “Traders have exchanged silk here for centuries,” I read, and even a section of the bazaar is still called Souq al-Harir – Silk Market . I fingered a length of brocade woven with the Damask rose motif, the threads still shimmering with gold and eggshell. Away from the glitter, a booth selling handmade fabrics displayed tiny looms and spindles – one of many examples of Damascus’s unique textile heritage. As Salar Bil the designer, I felt keenly the kinship of my craft: wherever I travel, woven fabric and cut cloth whisper the stories of each culture. Here it was the quilted satins and elaborate crewel embroideries that spoke of grand festivals and bridal nights; I imagined the aged merchant, older than I was, teaching me how a Damascene abaya must fall. In a quieter alley off the souq, I glimpsed workshops lit by afternoon shafts of light: the weaver’s shuttle flying as deft as a nightingale’s wing. I recalled how Saadi wrote of journeying: “the freshness it bringeth to the heart, the seeing and hearing of marvelous things, the delight of beholding new cities…” . Indeed, every turn brought marvels in color and design, and under that corrugated ceiling everything seemed dipped in a golden afternoon.
When hunger rose, I roamed to a corner café. The menu was a mosaic of local color: kibbeh smeared on flatbread, mujaddara lentils and rice, fragrant chicken makluba turned upside-down onto platters like pyramid cities of meat and saffron rice. I ate snug among grandfathers smoking tiny glass hookah pipes, Lebanese mothers stirring mint tea, and aunts in thobes embroidered with gold thread. I savored sweet lokum and thick pistachio baklava layered with silver leaf, and watched women in elegant jalabiyas stack boxes of powdered halva as if arranging jewelry. For dessert I sought out Bakdash, a famous old ice cream stand whose menu offers only two flavors – plain cream or the green-black mastic. There I watched the vendor pound the sticky blades of mastic into the city’s signature soft gelato, giving it a subtly chewy texture that left a chill on my tongue long after the cup was empty . With every bite I felt Damascus weaving into my memory as distinctly as the tapestries I’d seen being made.
In the late afternoon, I drifted into a different world of Damascus. In the West Midan district, brand-new malls sat beside crumbling Levantine houses. I wandered through the open plaza of the Cham City Center – a modern mall with marble floors and fountains – where upscale young Syrians shopped for Italian shoes and Middle Eastern couture . The windows of Damaskino displayed Target signs and local designer labels side by side . I found a shop selling hand-embroidered coats fusing traditional Palestinian tatreez patterns with sleek 21st-century cuts – a reminder that even in modern Damascus the threads of history and fashion were being stitched together. Outside on the avenues, posters of pop stars and advertisements for Carrefour shared concrete walls with faded Quranic verses. Mercedes SUVs rolled along roads scattered with pistachio shells from roadside stands; children sold freshly squeezed orange juice on corners; stray cats lounged in shade. I pressed my face to a glass window to watch an arcade of video games beside a falafel stand, and realized that this city is endlessly layering itself: the old lives inside the new.
Evening brought me back to the ancient quarters. I climbed the steps of the Madrasa al‑Assad al‑Farhoud, and there at dusk I looked over all Damascus lying in a valley below, surrounded by olive groves and vineyards that thin into the desert. The horizon faded from jasmine-gold to lilac, and the city’s stone softened to the color of taffeta. All around me, prayer calls mingled with traffic and the distant television drone – the old and the new singing their duet. In that moment I remembered Rumi’s words, that “When you start to walk on the way, the way appears.” I had begun this journey to study textiles and design, but walking among Damascus’s palaces, bazaars and gardens had woven me into a larger story.
I carried home swatches of damask and memories of mosaic pools. In every thread of fabric and cup of rose water I sensed a silent story – the record of the weavers, dyers and tailors who built this city with their skill. Like a fashion sketch that slowly takes shape, Damascus had unfolded before my eyes: Mughal tiles and Abbasid embroidery, Ottoman inlay and Greek columns, Persian poetry woven into the everyday. And as Saadi said, in every city learned we find “the delight of beholding new cities, the meeting of unknown friends” – this journey to Damascus had become, for me, a rediscovery of my own craft’s roots among a people who treasure design as much as life. And so, beneath the golden moon of Damascus, I found not only inspiration but kinship, and I carried that luminous thread back home with me, to stitch into the next chapter of my own creative tapestry.