The Old Pilgrim Route from Damascus

Damascus to Bosra, Syria

I have been using the same internet cafe the whole time I have been in Damascus because they serve tea and I can plug in my laptop and get a signal...... It is not always possible to get my laptop connected in some internet cafes and I am not sure why. In such places people always want to change things on the computer but when they see it is a Mac they mercifully leave it alone. And so I trundle off to the same place where we are now on first-name terms.

Of late, every afternoon a man comes in talking a million miles a minute in some unintellligible tongue (to me) and every day the crescendo rises until he is positively roaring down the line. I am sure there is a reason but it is very disconcerting. I am told he is talking to his wife. In my mind, he has come to epitomise the world's economic migrants; a million miles from home with the phone as their only link, they hear over broken connections and distorted lines about events and happenings over which they have no control but for which pay - sending money every month to the home they have left behind. There is something infinitely solitary and sad about it.........

And so back to the safety of the 16th century, long after Ibn Battuta had trod the earth. The Tekke Mosque was where the pilgrims gathered to start the journey south to Mecca. The mosque was built by the foremost of Suleiman the Magnificent’s architects, the incomparable Sinan.

Signature pencil minarets of Sinan.

Today the mosque sits in a park that includes workshops and handicraft stores. The pilgrim caravan was an occasion for trading, and goods were bought for trade or barter which is how some pilgrims financed the long and costly venture. However I digress, in Ibn B’ s day the gathering of the pilgrim caravan was the open area near the Bab Saghrir which is now a parking lot for Iranian buses disgorging incoming pilgrims rather than outgoing......