Posted 29 Nov 2008 — by sarah
Category Journeys
One reason I travelled to Damascus was that it seemed exotic and also it was just there, it was a destination. On the journey I started to look more and more at links and borders – lines of separation.
Once I got to Damascus I wasn’t quite sure why I’d come. I found myself wandering in those nameless streets. But I was glad to have travelled somewhere that’s sometimes spoken of negatively.
Actually, the streets do have names. They’re written on the signs in Arabic and English and also given a number. The numeric code gets round any confusion over inconsistencies in transliteration, I guess. Perhaps in practice nobody who knows the city uses them. For an outsider it’s useful to have a shared frame of reference. That way you can use your existing map and what people tell you as well as what’s actually around you to feel where you are.
Leaving home challenges you into reality, you’re forced to experience and absorb. Back home you can float in the familiar.
Posted 26 Nov 2008 — by sarah
Category Journeys
The Serbians are building the biggest Orthodox church in the world.
brankkoss
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.
Posted 07 Nov 2008 — by Sarah Eustance
Category Journeys
Damascus, I’m reliably informed by one of its biggest fans, is a city where street names are barely used. My informant insists that a police officer standing on, for example, the Umawiyeen roundabout and being asked for directions to that same Umawiyeen roundabout will likely not be able to point you in the right direction.
That sounds good to me. My mental maps are made up of my favourite shops or the best place to buy really good cake or memories of where I’ve been with people, what we laughed or argued about on that street or in that square. Road names and map coordinates are useful but they drag the mind back to prosaic reality and away from the personal geography that makes the world really familiar.
Getting to this city where they apparently share my feelings about maps all depends on that other prosaic reality of being granted the visa.
