When the families left, apparently to make their Good Friday visit to church, I put away my book and went outside for a walk. Arriving in Aleppo from Antioch on a Friday, the only official day off in Syria, was like entering another world. Antioch’s streets were nearly empty, while Aleppo’s on Fridays were so filled with humanity, mostly but not all male, that it was impossible to take a step without bumping into someone. Old mountain peasants in sharwals, peasants from the plain in abaya, poor workers in dirty, stained trousers, clerical workers in suits or wool trousers and sweaters, a few old city men wearing red tarbooshes on their heads and leaning heavily on their walking sticks. People made their way slowly, not through, but with, the crowd – pushing and bumping into one another without apology or offence as they went. Everywhere there were barrows with street vendors selling small items: sweets, lighters, matches, key-chains, worry beads, postcards, mostly useless but colourful bric à brac. The quiet dullness of Antioch gave way in Aleppo to the busy and bustling chaos of metropolitan life. Unlike Antioch, Aleppo had soldiers everywhere – off duty, in uniform, milling among the crowd, many of the conscript country boys looking for excitement in the city, going into the cinemas playing Italian Westerns, Indian adventure films and Egyptian melodramas. Each cinema pasted scores of photographs from its weekly offering on billboards outside, each exposing as much womanly flesh as possible.
I walked past a large, open square with an Ottoman clock tower at its bottom, and up a road to the left. When I turned right into a cul-de-sac of Armenian gold shops on both sides, I found thousands of Christians making visits to the three churches – Armenian Orthodox, Maronite Catholic and Greek Catholic – at the end. The Maronite church was in the middle. To its right were the cloisters and courtyard of the Melkite, or Greek, church. The Armenian church lay down a covered passageway to the left. It was the custom in Aleppo on Good Friday for Christians to visit churches of all sects, an ecumenical gesture unknown in Jerusalem, where the competing claimants to Christ’s sceptre were openly hostile to one another. This was one of the rare years on which the Catholic and Orthodox Easters fell on the same Sunday. I found myself caught in a mass of young and old men in suits and girls in frilly, Sunday dresses. All I could do was surrender myself to one of the currents in the stream of humanity, which, as it happened, was moving slowly towards the Maronite church. Around me, people of all ages were talking in Arabic or Armenian. The procession went through a door and up the right-hand aisle. We walked along the route of the Stations of the Cross, past pews filled with worshippers of all ages, under the bright lights of electric chandeliers overhead and hundreds of candles all around.
As we approached the main altar, I saw women behind the rail pick up pieces of cotton wool, dip them in warm oil and hand one to each person coming past. Most people handed the women a Syrian pound coin in return. Old women who received the cotton ball made a sign of the cross with it, rubbing the oil from the cotton into their foreheads. Some people would stop at a picture or statue of our Lord, or our Lady, or some saint, to say a short prayer. Many talked to friends they passed in the pews. We turned down the central aisle towards the main door, in front of which was a large table with priests and laymen who must have been elders of Aleppo’s Maronite community. On the table was a small fortune in Syrian pounds, donations collected that day from the passing faithful. The men counted the notes before putting them in neat stacks. I recognised one of them as Anthony Akras, the bespectacled British consul. He introduced me to his teenage son and invited me to tea later at his house.
I eased my way back out into the crowd, into another current moving through the centre of the square towards the Melkite church. We walked into a lovely, almost Norman courtyard, whose spring flowers were in bloom. Through stone vaults and arches, columns and trees, the procession took me into its bosom and across the threshold of a church even more ornate than the Maronite. The scene was similar, thousands of people slowly winding their way past the Stations of the Cross and up to the altar. Here young and old women were again dipping cotton into the oil, but they wrapped each ball in a fresh green leaf before exchanging it for a pound coin from the faithful. As in the Maronite church, women blessed themselves with the sacramental cotton. In the Melkite church, priests were hearing confession in open boxes along the aisles. Contrite Greek Catholics knelt in supplication, seeking penance and forgiveness, while the priest sat inside, in full view of us all, behind the iron bars of the confessional door, looking strangely like an automatic fortune-teller in a cage at a penny arcade.
Outside, another current in the great river of Christianity took me along tiny cobbled streets, first in the open air, then under arches between the buildings on either side, and into cavern-like tunnels. The crowd was all around in the darkness. I was trapped, but there was nothing to fear. Some of the women never stopped talking, and I could see over the heads of most of the people so that, unlike the children half my height, I knew where we were headed. The route took us to the end of the tunnel into the heart of this Christian quarter with its sturdy, stone buildings and its closed Armenian shops. We entered the Armenian church. Again, there was the same close, crowded feel as in the other two churches, the same bright lights and candles, the same women at the altar dipping and handing out bits of holy cotton wool, the same priests and elders at the table collecting money. Like all Orthodox churches, this one was filled with ikons. People would touch them as though reaching for grace. An old woman in black stroked a portrait of St Theresa. She slowly pulled her hand back from the wood and kissed her fingertips where they had touched the portrait. Other old women were lighting candles and making the Orthodox sign of the Cross, right shoulder to left, and kneeling to pray.
The ritual visits to the different churches, enacted every Good Friday in Aleppo, were as much social as religious. Outside in the courtyard of the Maronite church, young men and women stood in clusters, slyly eyeing one another. Their parents were laughing and talking about the decorations, the flowers, the candles and the other people in the churches. Some of them agreed to meet on Easter Sunday. Above us on balconies on both sides of the street, over the jewellers’ shops, young and old Armenian women gazed at the crowd below.
This was not the solemn Good Friday I was accustomed to in the West, or that I had seen in years past in Lebanon and Jerusalem. There was no formal church service after the visiting began at three o’clock. Nearly a quarter of Aleppo’s million inhabitants were Christian, and most of them were Armenian. The large Christian minority gave Aleppo a cosmopolitan character lacking in other Syrian cities, even Damascus, with its larger population, its diplomatic corps and international business community. Because of their long history and minority status, the Christians of Aleppo tended to ignore sectarian differences, the only significant division among them being more national than religious, between the Armenians and the Arab Christians. That division was more social than political, based on the fact that most Armenians were twentieth-century refugees from Turkey, people whose Arabic was at best a second, and often a third or fourth, language. On Good Friday, even this distinction dissolved, as Catholic and Orthodox Arabs and Armenians went to one another’s holy places to remember the Crucifixion, their Lord’s sacrifice for them all.
Back at the Baron’s Hotel, the manager, Armen Mazloumian, invited me to come on Easter Sunday for lunch with his family. Armen was the son of the hotel’s owner, Krikor Mazloumian, and had spent his life working there. He survived by complaining, about the staff, about the clientele, about the handicaps the government imposed on hoteliers, about bureaucratic inefficiency, about the traffic, and about just about everything that came his way. Half-Armenian, half-English, he spoke both languages, and Arabic, perfectly. He was in his mid-thirties, had a brush moustache and usually wore woollen trousers and an open shirt, often with a bandanna tied around his neck. Besides the hotel, he had one passion in life: exploring the hundreds of Roman and Byzantine towns, the so-called Dead Cities, in the open country around Aleppo, the ancient Syrian civilisation