Damascus

Damascus is the capital city of Syria.

It is very, very old. A river brings water from the mountains. Long ago, it made the land around the city green with gardens and fruit trees.

Damascus is the capital of Syria, in the southwest of the country. It sits on a flat shelf of land about 690 meters above sea level, below a mountain called Mount Qasioun.

The Barada River flows down from the Anti-Lebanon Mountains and waters a large, green oasis called al-Ghūṭah before it fades away into the desert. Travelers long praised the city's orchards of apricots and nuts, its olive groves and its gardens. Damascus has been nicknamed al-Fayḥāʾ, "the Fragrant," and many scholars think it may be the oldest city in the world that people have lived in all the time.

Damascus lies in the southwestern corner of Syria, some 80 km from the Mediterranean but cut off from it by two mountain ranges. The city grew on a terrace about 690 m above sea level, south of Mount Qasioun, where the Barada, rising in the Anti-Lebanon range, watered the fertile oasis of al-Ghūṭah. From the 2nd millennium BCE an intricate system of irrigation channels branched from the river to feed the city and its farms.

Its Arabic name comes from Dimashka, a word possibly older than the Semitic languages; it is also commonly called al-Shām, the everyday name for Syria as a whole. Britannica estimated the municipality at 1,669,000 people in 2007, on 43 km². The city's growth since World War II has sharply raised the ratio of buildings to trees, and Britannica reports that more than half of its green space has been lost since 1945.

The Old City of Damascus has a wall with eight gates.

In the middle stands a huge mosque with a big dome and tall towers. Long ago, its walls sparkled with golden pictures of trees and houses.

The heart of Damascus is its Old City, an oblong about 1.5 kilometers long and 1 kilometer wide, surrounded by old walls with eight gates. Its main street runs from the western gate to the eastern gate along the line of a Roman road, which now lies about 5 meters below the street you walk on today.

The Great Mosque, also called the Umayyad Mosque, was built between 706 and 715. Its walls were once covered in golden mosaics showing trees, buildings and villages, and pieces of them survive. Nearby are a medieval citadel, the Azem Palace, old inns called khans, public baths and houses built around courtyards.

The Old City is a rough oblong some 1,500 m by 1,000 m, Hellenistic in origin with major Roman additions. Sizeable stretches of its walls survive, especially in the north and west, pierced by eight gates, seven of Classical origin. Its long axis, from Bāb al-Jābiyya in the west to Bāb Sharqī in the east, follows the Roman decumanus maximus, now some 5 m below street level. The citadel in the northwest corner rests on Roman foundations.

About 200 m east of it stands the Great Mosque, built by the Umayyad caliph al-Walīd between 706 and 715 on a site occupied before it by a Roman temple and a Byzantine church. Damaged, burned and repaired several times, it is still counted among the marvels of Islamic architecture; gilded mosaic once covered its walls, and the surviving fragments show mostly plant themes and buildings in imaginary landscapes. UNESCO's list of the Old City's 125 protected monuments includes the Citadel, the Azem Palace, madrasas, khans, public baths and private houses.

In the Old City, craftspeople still make beautiful things by hand.

They tap patterns into copper. They set shiny pieces of shell into wood. They weave fancy cloth. Long ago, each neighborhood had its own bakery oven and little market.

Damascus has been famous for its crafts for hundreds of years. In the Middle Ages it was known for swords and lace, and different parts of the city specialized in different trades. In the Old City, craftspeople still engrave copper, decorate woodwork with mother-of-pearl (the shiny inside of shells) and weave brocade, a rich patterned cloth.

By the 1100s, each neighborhood had its own mosque, bathhouse, public oven, water supply and small markets, while the Great Mosque and the central market brought everyone together. Old inns called khans gave traveling merchants a place to stay and store their goods.

Britannica notes that Damascus's population grew more than tenfold in the second half of the 20th century, mainly through migration from rural areas, so the average age is below the national level. Most residents are Arab Sunni Muslims; Druze, Kurds, Circassians, Twelver Shiʿis and Ismāʿīlīs keep their own identities, and there is a Palestinian community and a substantial Christian population of several denominations, including Syriac and Armenian.

Government is the largest economic activity. Long known for luxury textiles, the city added textile, chemical, cement and food-processing plants from the mid-20th century, while artisans in the Old City still practice copper engraving, mother-of-pearl inlay and brocade weaving. Medieval khāns (warehouse inns) lined the trade roads; two monumental khāns south of the Great Mosque date from 1732 and 1751–52. A large international trade fair is held each autumn, and Syria's first stock exchange opened here in March 2009.