Khair plans to spend nearly $1 million restoring the home. But as a mother of four children, she intends to keep her apartment in the suburbs, spending summers in the Old City and the rest of the time in a place where a school bus can pull up to her door.
"Now all of my friends are looking for places," Khair said.
The Omayyad Mosque rises in the background of Old Damascus. It is one of the world's oldest inhabited cities and was a major trading hub.
(2002 Photo John Moore -- AP)
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Old Damascus was an important trading hub on the Silk Road between the Far East and Europe. At its peak, 100,000 people of various professions, tribes and faiths lived inside its walls. The vast Omayyad Mosque, once shared by Christians and Muslims, rests on the remains of a 3rd-century Roman temple, which itself sits on the ruins of an Aramaic temple built 1,000 years earlier. Tradition holds that after his blinding conversion on the road to Damascus, Saint Paul recovered his sight in a stone hut on Hanania Street.
But almost half the population deserted the Old City in the 1950s, leaving the current population of about 50,000 people, most of them poor. The uneven alleys are a testament to the haphazard change over the years. Earthquake rubble became the foundation for new homes, some now perched on 15 feet of debris accumulated over centuries.
The restoration today is being managed more efficiently by an earnest engineer who sits behind a huge, carved-wood desk off an alley draped with vines. Ali Mubaiyed was born in the Old City, and now he is the busy director of planning and administration for Old Damascus.
Mubaiyed said that more than 60 private homes, representing 10 percent of Old Damascus, are being renovated. The number of new applications is spiking, he said, and almost all are from young Syrians.
"It is mainly a result of having traveled abroad, seeing how other people are attached to their cultural heritage and returning with those feelings," Mubaiyed said. "This idea that they are inheritors of one of the world's oldest cities is striking their imagination."
But Mubaiyed said he faces many challenges in trying to ensure that the renovation is not only historically accurate, but preserves the livelihoods of the merchants who still sell herbal remedies, baskets of roasted cashews and pistachios, custom-made swords and Rolex watches. As prices rise, so does the pressure for them to sell their homes.
"We don't want this to become a phantom city -- one that lives at night and dies during the day," Mubaiyed said. "More important even than the restoration is making sure we preserve the demographics, making sure it stays alive."
Samer Kozah, an art dealer, never left the home on Taleh Fudda Street in the Christian Quarter where he was born 46 years ago. His grandfather and father, a goldsmith, were born there too. Kozah has spent $80,000 transforming the place into an art gallery and studio, carefully restoring wooden balconies, buckling ceilings and stone carvings that grace the doorways.
In the 1950s, he said, all but five of the 30 families who lived in his neighborhood left for the suburbs. Many are coming back, and their return is driving up property values. Over the past three years, the value of his house has increased from $160,000 to $250,000, as a number of nearby homes have been sold for renovation.
"You always find a surprise when you start," said Kozah, who has $20,000 worth of work left. "But I like what I have done. It is exactly as my father had it."
Soon, Old Damascus will face fresh competition from modernity. A Planet Hollywood restaurant is scheduled to open outside the walls in the next year, alongside a new Four Seasons Hotel. The columned facade of the Hijaz Railway Station, dating to the late 19th century, will soon become the entrance to a shopping mall that covers an entire city block just outside the Old City. To the patrons of Opaline, however, the new glitz holds little appeal.
"Our modern suburbs are dull and faded copies of what Europe and America have to offer," said Farouk Ayyash, the former director of the Commercial Bank of Syria, as he puffed on a Cuban Montecristo cigar. "When we come down here, it's authentic, original, not a copy of anyplace else in the world."
