Sally Mazloumian came into the room with Armen. A robust woman in late middle age, younger than her husband, she had developed along the lines set in that photograph from the 1940s: her bobbed blonde hair was greying and longer; her fresh, healthy face had grown warm and friendly, the ingenuousness had become maternal with the years. She introduced herself and asked me to call her Sally, which I did, and her husband Koko, which I could not. She put some pistachios, called fistu halabi or “Aleppo nuts” in Arabic, on a table for us and told us to sit down. When her husband was talking, she would occasionally, without a word, put some drops in his eye. She was still, forty years on, the devoted nurse Krikor Mazloumian had married the year after the French army left Syria.
The Mazloumian family were comparatively recent arrivals in Syria, though they preceded most of Aleppo’s other Armenians. “My grandfather came to Aleppo in 1882, to settle here. Before that, he had been through Aleppo on his way to Jerusalem on pilgrimage. Because of persecutions in our own village in Turkish Armenia, he decided to move to this … developing metropolis of the Ottoman Empire. Trade was very good, because Aleppo supplied the whole of south-eastern Anatolia with goods. So my grandfather decided to come and settle in Aleppo.”
“What was his business?”
“He opened the very first hotel in Aleppo. He called it the Hotel Ararat. It was in the bazaars. Until then, travellers had been lodged in bare rooms in the upper floor of the khans – caravanserais – where they threw their own mattresses onto the floor, slept and cooked in the same room, and washed around the well in the courtyard. In my grandfather’s hotel, there was a proper bed, an iron bedstead, and a bedside table, candlestick, washbasin, all the sort of elementary ‘mod cons’ of those days, and a restaurant, which was also patronised by rich merchants of the town. My father and my uncle grew up in that very cosmopolitan atmosphere, because all the guests in my grandfather’s hotel were foreigners. When they reached maturity, each one with the help of their father opened hotels with rather pompous names in the modern quarters of the town. One was called the Azizieh Palace Hotel. The other was the Aleppo Palace Hotel. They had about a dozen or so rooms each and a restaurant. They did well. They charged one gold sovereign a day. Everything was so cheap. They then decided to get together and build a very modern hotel for those days, on the outskirts of the town.”
“Why did they call it Baron’s?” I had met Krikor Mazloumian on previous trips to Aleppo, but this was the first chance I had ever had to ask him about his family and the hotel they had run for eighty years.
“Because they had been addressed by the Armenian staff of the hotel as Baron,” he said, pronouncing “Baron” in the French manner, the accent on the second syllable, “which in Armenian means Sir or Mister. My father’s guests were intrigued, and they started calling my father and my uncle, Mr Baron or plain Baron. When the two brothers decided to build this hotel, they called it Baron’s Hotel in the possessive, because by that time the name Baron had sort of stuck. It was quite a success from the very day of opening. The hotel flourished from 1911 to 1914.”
From then, the hotel’s story was linked to the fate of Syria and the Mazloumian family. “When the war was declared in 1914, the hotel was populated by either German generals, heads of German military missions like Leiman von Sanders, or commanders-in-chief like Jemal Pasha of Turkey. For all intents and purposes, it became part of the Turkish Army, although it was run along the lines of a hotel. We were exiled for a year and a half. And shortly after our return, the war ended. Our last guest in the hotel, for the last three months, was Moustafa Kemal Pasha, later known as Atatürk. He was the last man to leave the hotel when the Turks were retreating and the British were advancing. After the occupation of Aleppo, we had the visit of General Allenby for a day or two. I think the British occupation lasted six months or so. It was followed by King Feisal of Syria, whose tenure didn’t even last that long. Very shortly afterwards, he was ousted by the French. The French army which occupied Syria kept it until 1946.
“In the 1930s, we had a period of calm and a period when tourism really flourished. We had famous guests in the hotel in the thirties, a lot of airmen, record-breakers, and what-have-you. Almost daily, we had private aeroplanes flying through Aleppo, eastbound, westbound. It was a period which in the history of the hotel is something you can look back upon with nostalgia. During the Second World War, we had the British occupation. Quite a number of very famous soldiers stayed with us: Auchinleck was one, Général Catroux. De Gaulle did not stay with us, but he had several meals in the hotel and addressed the crowds from our terrace. After that we had Syrian independence. Our last illustrious guest was our president, Hafez al-Assad.” With that, history seemed to end, leaving only memory and the attempt to survive.
“The Baron’s used to be on the Grand Tour. Everyone wrote about it. When did what you might call fashionable travellers stop coming to Syria?” I asked.
“It all stopped with World War Two. After the war, we had very few of those glamorous personalities – Gene Tunney, or the Lindberghs, or the Roosevelts, or royalty, quite a few royal families, the Swedish, the Danish, the British. Now the fashion has turned into mass tourism. It’s groups coming in in hordes, and going out in hordes. It’s no longer interesting from an innkeeper’s point of view. It has none of the charm and attraction.”
“Were there any interesting regulars?”
“We had one famous German archaeologist, Baron Max von Oppenheim. He spoke beautiful Parisian French. He was short and stocky. In the old days, it was the hallmark of archaeology to wear the sun-helmet. He’d been digging even before the First World War. In the thirties, old Baron Max used to come here in the middle of winter, even when it was snowing, and he wore his sun-helmet. He had a massive stick, which he moved around in the air to emphasise what he was saying. It was quite a menace if you happened to be in the way. Last time he was here, he was ninety-two. He got ill, and we went to see him in the Armenian hospital. When he came back, I heard the nurses complaining that every time they went near his bed, he pinched their bottoms. Oh, we also had a very courtly Armenian gentleman who used to come to our night club, when we had one. He had perfect manners, always impeccably dressed. He once admitted to me he was so polite that when he was about to make love to a young lady, he would ask, ’Madamemoiselle, permittez que je vous monte?’” At this, he laughed.
“Did I hear the British used the hotel as their headquarters after the war?”
“After the First World War, yes.”
“And they never paid their bill?”
He whispered his answer, as though he were embarrassed, “No, they did not. Anyway …”
“How was it during the Second World War?”
“Everything was hush-hush. There was a poster behind the bar of a large ear. In the middle of the ear was a swastika. Everyone was supposed to be careful. I remember we had a young woman staying with a man she said was her brother. She gave her name as Christine Granville, but she was Polish. He was an officer in Prince Victor’s Own Regiment, whose motto was, ‘From Kabul to Kandahar.’ This was the regiment that dethroned his great-grandfather, the King of Afghanistan. He had a ring from Queen Victoria which said, ‘From enemy to enemy, from friend to friend.’ We used to go shooting great bustards, what you’d call wild turkeys, on the Raqqa road. Some time later, I had a letter from her asking me to send a Red Cross parcel to Hissam, this great grandson of the King of Afghanistan. He’d been made a prisoner of war in Italy. By the time I sent the Red Cross parcel, he’d already escaped. But he was recaptured.”
“What happened to Christine Granville?”
“Years later, I read in The Times she’d been murdered by an Irishman. Then the story came out. She had run away from Poland to Hungary. She was to all intents and purposes a British agent in Hungary. She spent some time here, she went down to Palestine, she came back here, she went to Algeria. She was dropped in France, where she did great things, saving quite a few lives. Incidentally, she saved Xan Fielding’s life.” Xan Fielding, a legendary British irregular in the Second World War, had also stayed at the Baron’s. “She refused jobs, like Lawrence of Arabia before,