Lovely Strasbourg claims to be the Capital of Christmas 2008.
When I arrive I see people waiting for the shopping mall to open its doors for the day. Thinking of Damascus Souk I go in and look around the same way, as if everything were strange and all the details were deeply interesting.
We head together up an escalator under a pyramid skylight. The multimedia store Fnac’s crammed with gadgets and gifts, including Johnny Hallyday CDs and electric photo frames.
I leave.
My journey to Strasbourg will be on the Orient Express.
Agatha Christie was a frequent visitor to Syria with her second husband, Max Mallowan. He was an archaeologist and worked on some of the country’s most famous sites. He is honoured in the National Museum in Damascus.
Murder on the Orient Express was reputedly written at the famous Baron Hotel in Aleppo, Syria.
The Serbians are building the biggest Orthodox church in the world.
St Sava in Belgrade is a huge space made of concrete. It lacks the peaceful feeling of other holy places I’ve visited, but that could be down to the ongoing building works.
A mason is electrically chiselling a white marble capital for one of the columns, creating an arabesque pattern of foliage and the face of a low-ranking angel. Lions, elephants and eagles are carved along the arches.
It seems like an amazing thing to do to carve out a place of worship like this – or to carve out a country, which has happened here repeatedly.
The journey out and the journey home are quite different. The trip out is towards the unknown and the anticapted. The trip back takes me ever closer to the known. Thoughts about chores keep appearing in my mind.
I am taking a different route back – through two cities I don’t know Belgrade and Strasbourg then getting closer to the familiar with Paris, where I lived for a while.
Tito’s mausoleum in Belgrade is known as the House of Flowers -Kuća cvijeća/Kuća cveća. The taxi driver tells me it is also known as the 25th May, the Yugoslav leader’s birthday.
‘ As a child, I took part in these displays’ he tells me, ‘ you see them now in China and North Korea, like gymnastics.’
‘Were you proud?’ I ask. Screwing up his face he can’t remember, ‘Just that we had to practise for months, three or four.’
The tomb itself is white marble with Tito’s name and dates in gold, Roman letters. It’s in an upmarket suburb of the city, in a secluded, wooded spot which is dripping wet like everything else in the heavy rain. There are pictures of boys and girls in ironed white sports uniforms raising their arms and legs in unison to honour the head of state.
Around two-hundred-and-fifty batons are also on display. Thousands were handed to Tito as part of an annual Yugoslavian relay race for his birthday. They’re from cities, sports clubs, the Cycling Union of Macedonia, the Builders of the Fraternity-Unity Highway, the People of Croatia among others.
There are carved wooden batons, painted batons, one made from shells, one with scissors and a needle, one a miniature silver tank.
The final one in 1987 – after Tito’s death – was made from plexiglass with eight red blood-like drops. “It could augur the beginning of blood shed in the region” is the curator’s comment.
Central Belgrade – themechanicalturk
I keep thinking about the Damascus streets. It’s true the names don’t really matter. It matters more what’s sold in any particular place. So you get the spice street and the animal skins street and the alley where they sell wood burning stoves. That’s Old Damascus, which is part straightened out old buildings. Straight Street where St Paul underwent his conversion to Christianity is like this.
Just behind all this, tourist friendly part, is another Old Damascus, more for people who actually live there. There are kids playing football, many old buildings well on the way to falling down. In among them some Ottoman houses have been renovated.
Elsewhere the huge Four Seasons Hotel, a major landmark, has developed a European style covered plaza complete with coffee shop chains and higher end designer labels. Behind this is an area known as Sha’alan which has Benetton, Kookai, Promod and plenty of coffee and juice bars. In the evening this is full of people out to be seen and see who and what is around.
Walking in between these areas one evening I passed a young child, about ten, sleeping on a footbridge with a selection of sweets laid out for sale on a piece of cardboard in front of her.
