BOSRA

BOSRA

After a week which, climatically speaking, ran the full gamut from the hamseen or wind which blows in from the desert casting a ghostly yellowish light everywhere and carrying tons of sand (Fortunately it only lasted two days and not the fifty from which its name is derived) to rain and snow, Friday dawned bright and sunny, so we set off on our planned excursion to Bosra, which lies ten kilometres from the Jordanian border but only about a hundred kilometres from Damascus.

The Jordan road heads south from Damascus and initially the dominant feature was the sight of the snow-covered triple peak of Mount Hermon, or Jebel ash-Sheikh as it is known in Arabic, which stands 3,000m high.  The very name of this mountain with all its associations is quite evocative but, even before Christianity arrived, it was associated with the semitic and Near Eastern tradition of sacred high places to which Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac and Moses going up the mountain to receive the tablets of stone all belong.

The road climbs to reach the Hauran plateau which spreads out between the Ante-Lebanon mountains to the west and the Jebel al-Arab range of volcanic hills to the east. The Jebel al-Arab was formerly known as the Jebel ad-Druze and before that the Jebel al-Hauran. As is often the case, in places where volcanic action has occurred, the areas not covered by the lava flows are extremely fertile and this is the best cultivated land we have seen so far in Syria, with olive groves, vineyards and vegetable gardens. The landscape is dotted with immense boulders of black basalt which lend a sombre air. In  ancient times, the Hauran was one of the granaries of the Roman Empire - like Egypt only on a smaller scale- supplying goods to satiate the apparently insatiable appetite of the Empire for good of all kinds. The new Jordan highway is a dual carriageway with a good surface so the journey to Bosra takes only an hour and a half. One thing which attracted our attention both on the way down and on the return journey was the number of Turkish buses making their way to Jordan - hundreds of them and all empty!  I can only think that they were going to Mecca where they would pick up Turkish pilgrims who had made the outward journey by plane but would return overland.

The ancient city of Bosra we see today, like so many cities in Syria, was probably laid out during the Hellenic period and its grid street pattern still remains. The Romans kept the basic layout but endowed  the city with the standard Roman format of a main thoroughfare running west to east, the  Decamanus, with another main thoroughfare crossing at right angles, the cardus maximus.  However, Bosra’s importance predates both the Greeks and the Romans because already in the Bronze Age it was an important settlement and is mentioned in the records of the Egyptian eighteenth dynasty.  It also appears in the bible in the Book of the Maccabees when Judas Maccabeus seized it in 163B.C. In the latter stages of the Nabatean Kingdom, which rose to prominence in what is modern Jordan, they moved their capital from Petra to Bosra which was better placed to gain from the caravans carrying spices and other luxury items from the east to the west as the route was less arduous than the more southerly desert route.  However, it was during Roman times that Bosra gained its greatest height. When the Spanish-born emperor Trajan conquered the area in 106A.D. he confirmed Bosra’s status and made it the capital of the province of Arabia calling it Nova Trajana Bostra. One of the benefits of the Pax Romana was that the caravans which normally travelled further north in an arc following the course of the Euphrates began to use the more southerly route through Bosra as it was easier to take the road skirting the desert when the danger of banditry and such like had disappeared.  Bosra then became the head of the new road the Romans built down to the Gulf of Aqaba, the Via Trajana, which was the successor to the biblical road known as the King’s Highway.  


We had intended not to go straight to the Roman theatre, which is the most important monument in Bosra, but, as we took a wrong turning at the entrance to the town, we found ourselves at the theatre like it or not, so we decided just to go ahead, particularly as a freezing wind was blowing and we felt that our visit might have to be cut short if we were not to be frozen to death.  Before entering the theatre, however, a number of formalities had to be dealt with, in the shape of numerous children all wanting to sell us postcards and maps and be our guide.  As we had acquired  two excellent books, we felt that no guide was needed but, in any case, the tenacity of these boys is admirable and their grasp of several foreign languages without ever having been taught any of them is quite astounding.  We felt particularly sorry for one poor fellow with his shabby brown jacket and his head wrapped in a keffiyeh, for his “competitors” were quick to point out that his book of postcards was dog-eared and had a dirty mark on it.  Robert then proceeded to tell them that they should concentrate on promoting the excellence of their own wares without denigrating those of the opposition.  In the end, we bought one set of cards from one group and another (dog-eared) lot from the poor unfortunate who seemed to be out on a limb.  Then a cup of Turkish coffee in a ramshackle stall and in we went.

The theatre at Bosra is perhaps the best preserved Roman theatre anywhere in the world, and its marvellous state of preservation is due to two main factors.  The first is that it is built of the ubiquitous black basalt volcanic stone which is hard and weathers much better than the softer stones, such as marble, used in other Roman constructions elsewhere.  The second major factor is that during the Crusades an Arab citadel was built around the theatre to act as the defence point, because Bosra was regarded as the southernmost defensive position for Damascus.  This is certainly true because, if Bosra were taken, then it was only a matter of marching up that long plateau and Damascus was there for the taking.

So, the entrance took us into the heart of the citadel, a massive construction which fulfils every expectation about dungeons and dark, dank holes, and the black stone only serves to magnify this impression of massiveness and power.  Then, quite suddenly the theatre appears.  It is quite remarkable.  The stage area is intact and there are columns of pink Egyptian marble which stand out even more against the dark stone of the main construction.  Then, the seating rises up with over 37 tiers which could accommodate 15,000 spectators altogether. The acoustics are so outstanding that at normal conversational level a voice on the stage can be heard in the very top tier (Can’t modern architects learn anything from the ancients?). Another factor which contributed to the preservation of the seating tiers was that over the centuries the “pit” had become filled with sand blowing in from the desert.

On the point of turning into icicles, we decided to take the dog out for a walk and then have a cup of coffee.  Inside the citadel we had met an Arab family from Aleppo in the north, one of whose members had learned some English years ago and was very anxious to practise, so they wanted to have their photo taken with the dog and offered us some biscuits. The whole family of six adults and numerous children had come in an old yellow taxi and it was there that they were intending to have their breakfast which they invited to us to join.  However, being made of less stern stuff,  we declined as graciously as we could and opted for the Cham Hotel cafeteria which was warm and comfortable.

After our reconstituting Turkish coffee, we decided to brave the elements once more and try and have a look at the Roman town as such, so we parked outside the aptly named Bab al-howa, or Gate of the Winds, which was the main entrance to the city from the west, and walked along the main east-west thoroughfare towards the Nabatean Arch which marks the eastern end. The paving is virtually intact all  the way and the interesting thing about Bosra is that people still live and have little shops in what were once Roman homes and shops, so the feeling as you walk down the street is not of a dead city at all but of one which is still alive and going about its business.  Of course, almost all the colonnades have been destroyed, but the few which remain give the impression of what it must once have been like when Bosra was in its heydey and the most colonnaded city of the Empire.  

A set of four columns which were part of a nymphaeum or public water fountain mark the intersection of the decamanus with the main-north south thoroughfare, the cardo maximus. There is an undergound market-place and baths. For the less cultured members of society there was also a hippodrome.  The city was supplied with water from three cisterns, one of which we saw and it was full of water.  

With the decline of the Roman Empire which had, in any case, recognized Christianity as an official religion and given it its “coming-of age charter”, and the advent of the Byzantine era, Bosra remained an important centre, being made first a bishopric and later an archbishopric.  In fact, the pre-Islamic Arab kingdom of the Ghassanids built a cathedral there which in its day was one of the greatest cathedrals in the East.  The cathedral is no longer standing but the site is fenced off and there are many remains of pillars and capitals.  This cathedral, which was covered with a dome 26m in diameter, was important in the development of Byzantine religious architecture culminating in the great domed buildings of Ravenna and Constantinople. It was also the immediate forerunner of the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, which was built less than two hundred years later.


The importance of the city did not end there.  In fact the monastery of the monk Bahira  is revered as a sacred place by Moslems too, because it was here that the Prophet Mohammed acquired the basic building blocks for the new religion he was to bequeath to the world.  Mohammed’s was a merchant family in Medina and, as a young man, Mohammed travelled along the caravan routes with his uncle.  During one of these trips he entered into conversation with the monk Bahira who instructed him in the tenets of the Nestorian variety of Christianity which Mohammed then digested and interwove with the other great religion of the area, Judaism, to give rise to Islam which takes aspects from each. In the midst of some ruins just opposite the site of the cathedral was the tiniest donkey I have ever seen.  It was only about half the size of Gusto, my sister Barbara’s St. Bernard, and scarcely came up to waist height.  I had heard of the tiny Sicilian donkey  but I had never seen such a small specimen.

Due to the significance of the place in the development of Islam, many early mosques were built at Bosra using stones taken from Roman and Byzantine monuments. The architecture of all the mosques in Bosra is solid and they all have substantial square minarets at one corner quite a contrast to the slender minarets of later constructions.  As we walked around the town, the call to Friday midday prayers rang out and a sea of faithful, both young and old, began to make their way particularly to the Mosque of Omar.  We then had to be careful to keep the dog well to the side so as not to contaminate the ritual purity of those who had carried out their ablutions to attend Friday prayers.

Perhaps the most striking sight for me was on the return walk from the eastern to the western gate when the whole road stretches out straight ahead and the perspective is better than when walking in the other direction.  We stood to one side as a shepherd came walking up the street, his flock following obediently behind him and a small boy, presumably his son, whose job it was to make sure that no stragglers got lost on the way, bringing up the rear.  It was such an age-old scene: the long galabeyah, the keffiyeh around his head, just as it has been for thousands of years.  

So, despite the howling wind which cut like a knife, we managed to see most of the main sites of Bosra and savour the atmosphere of a bygone age in the streets of a town which carry the memory of ages in those solid black stones.

March 20th