CALIFORNIA

In 2005, British travel writer Diana Darke bought an Ottoman-era courtyard house in the Old City of Damascus. One of the only foreigners to own property in the Roman-walled center of Syria’s capital, Darke began to build a life for herself in a mixed Sunni-Shia quarter of the Old City, in a house known as Bait Baroudi—the “House of the Gunpowder Seller.” It was splendid but dilapidated; a three-year restoration made the house look old again, “as if the inhabitants of earlier centuries had just left.”

Then, of course, everything changed. Civil war broke the idyll of the Old City as violence raged outside its walls; Jebel Qassioun, the mountain that overlooks Damascus and a popular picnic spot, became the Assadregime’s launching pad for artillery and chemical weapons on rebel-held suburbs below. The narrative that resulted from Syria’s brutal descent is Darke’s powerful, moving new book, My House in Damascus, a hybrid memoir and travel book that elegantly contrasts a real estate dream with Syria’s ongoing violent reality.

Many more have suffered far greater pains in Syria in recent years than Darke, who spent the last 30 years working in the Middle East as a consultant, fluent in Arabic, before buying her house in Damascus. Yet her sensitive, knowing story captures a rare view of Syria and the stakes of the conflict from an up-close observer deeply versed in its culture.

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http://www.levantinecenter.org/event/diana-darke-my-house-damascus