Maaloula Syria: The Jesus’s Dialect

*I was fortunate enough to travel to Syria and see the country in 2008, three years before the war broke out. This homage to Syria is a reminder, the story about the country with immense cultural heritage, posted here with the wholehearted wish for peace to be restored and cities rebuilt.

Welcome to Maaloula Syria!

One of the places in Syria you will be amazed by is situated only 56 kilometers from Damascus, among the rocks of the Anti-Lebanon Mountains that separate the country and Lebanon. High up in the mountains lies a small settlement by the name of Maaloula where people still speak the Syrian dialect also known as the Western Aramaic language.

This Christian village was always well known worldwide for this dialect was used, believe it or not, by Jesus, and some books of the Old Testament were written in it.

Maaloula Syria

St Takla Maaloula Syria

The whole village was tucked into mountain rocks and gradually spread down. When we approached the settlement coming from the valley, there was a beautiful view of the whole Maaloula.

Church bell towers were peaking among buildings and up there, at the highest rock, there was the large Statue of Jesus watching over the whole Christian village. Streets curved between buildings and you could see that the small town was live and bustling, people were chatting and shopping for groceries.

There were private houses, scattered over surrounding rocks, just as they were floating in the air.

Maaloula was also famous for housing two monasteries – dedicated to Saint Thecla, and Saint Sergius and Bacchus. The village was tightly linked to the history of the pagan Saint Thecla converted by Saint Paul.

The Greek Orthodox convent is erected at the place where she was said to have found permanent refuge. According to the legend, the mountain miraculously opened, creating the narrow gorge in the upper part of the village that allowed the girl to escape from her persecutors.

 

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Local nuns smiled at us while we were trying to climb the stairs towards the church, which was decorated with beautiful Christian frescoes. And while standing in front of the church I looked up towards the extraordinary sight – a part of the monastery looked as if it was emerging from the rock.

Maaloula Syria: Aramaic heritage

The other monastery seemed even more authentic. It was built in stone with a small courtyard and authentic frescoes inside. Sergius and Bacchus were Roman officials who converted to Christianity in the late 3rd century AD. After you have come such a long way and reached Maaloula Syria and the monastery, the monks would have respectively invited you to come in and taste their wine.

There was a small Lebanese restaurant on the outskirts of the village of Maaloula Syria with traditional specialties where we took our lunch break. There were also children on the street who were reciting a couple of sentences in Western Aramaic! They were extremely likable even though you don’t understand a word.

Hama Syria: Wooden Norias

There was another special town not far from Maaloula Syria which has been constantly inhabited for five millennia, just like Damascus was. The town of Hama flourished in the 2nd millennium BC when it was the capital of the Aramaic dynasty of Syro-Hittite culture.

Subsequently, it was conquered by the Assyrians, the Persians, and then the Macedonians. A relative decline occurred during Roman and Byzantine times, while the city’s entry into the Islamic world in 638 AD marked a new period of prosperity.

One of the most interesting and best-preserved monuments of the time was without doubt the Al Nuri Mosque on the right bank of the Orontes River built in 1170.

This river was very important to Hama since it housed a special town attraction tourists from around the world came to see. Those were the giant wooden water wheels also known as the norias, used until not so long ago to draw and distribute water from Orontes to the city. They were still used for several months a year at the time I visited but with the sole purpose of maintaining the traditional image of the city since Orontes waters subsided over time so much that the wheels could not even reach its surface.

They say that it was quite a sight witnessing norias spinning because they produced a specific sound, creaking and squeaking, that was hard to forget.

There were still 16 of them in 2008, half the number originally built, and almost all of them dated back to the Middle Ages.

Crazy traffic

When it comes to the town itself, besides the monuments that gave a special atmosphere to the place, there was a smell of stale water in the air that was hard to miss. It made it a bit hard to breathe considering the 30 degrees Celsius in May.

There were a lot of people on the streets, like in any other Syrian town I visited that year, but the traffic seemed chaotic with everyone seemingly going the way they chose, along with honking to everybody and everything. The Syrians passing by didn’t seem to notice it somehow.

We passed by boys sitting on a few boxes on the nearby stairs. They smiled as though they were the happiest in the world. People were selling all kinds of goods lined up on the floor. Another shoe-shining boy was at the corner, and covered women were looking at us with their beautiful eyes like we just came from a different planet…

What a confusing and interesting atmosphere!

Next: PALMYRA TEMPLE

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