Damascus in the 19th century was a sleepy provincial town of the Ottoman empire. It was endowed with some importance only by the meeting of the two main roads of Meccan pilgrimage coming from Anatolia and Persia, respectively. The city began to develop only from the 1920s when it became the center of the French Middle East mandate, and from 1946, after the independence of Syria. Perhaps it is due to the fast modernization and to the nostalgia inevitably following it that local web forums endeavor first of all to reconstruct the topography and everyday life of pre-independence Damascus on the basis of old photos. Here we publish some of them.
“While we were passing through the crowded bazaars this after-noon, I was very much interested and amused by the number and variety of the street calls or cries. Two lads, carrying between them a large tray loaded of bread, cried out, Ya Karim! ya Karim! That is not the name for bread. No, it is one of the attributes of God, and signifies the bountiful or generous; and since bread is the staff of life, the name implies that it is the gift of the Bountiful One”. W. M. Thompson: The Land and the Book, 1886