Posts tagged: architecture

Seven Hills

I love cities built on hills. Amman’s Jebel Hussein appears as a mass of haphazard grey or ochre, concrete buildings, each piled upon another. I can’t help but compare it to the ordered rows of red-bricked terrace houses of Sheffield’s industrial-revolution period, working class houses. A similar demographic, but a very different aesthetic.

Yet rather than being attracted to the city with the promise of work in the factory, the people here were forced from their land in what-was-then Palestine. Push-, rather than pull-, migration, I suppose.

The New Downtown of Amman

Crossing any border involving Syria seems to also involve smuggling. The driver of the shared taxi I took handed me several packets of duty-free cigarettes to stuff into my jacket as we were waved through into the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. Maybe he felt I owed him one for the wait that was incurred once the staff issuing the visas saw the Iranian stamps in my passport. It promptly disappeared out back for half an hour before they granted me leave to enter the country.

Arriving into Amman from Damascus initially came as quite a culture shock. The place is undergoing a huge amount of construction. The skeletons of buildings take form, cranes dominate the skyline, and everything seems all very new. I had grown used to the absence of occidental chains in Syria. McDonalds, Starbucks, Toni & Guy; Amman has it all, so to speak.

The military also reflect the Western dollars in the country. The army & guards in Syria are usually quite a scruffy affair, brandishing tattered old machine guns, and often in an equally tattered old leather jacket. Not so in Jordan. The army here keep their boots shined and their fire-power reflects the $464 million of US economic assistance they receive. (2006 figure.) The machine guns were of the M-16 variety (as opposed to that of a Kalashnikov), and it wasn’t unusual to see a jeep with an oh-my-god-look-at-the-size-of-that gun bolted to the roof. No messing here.

The place is full of contrasts, and there is still a lot of poverty. These new developments I speak of sit on one side of the hill, and the other side houses the pre-fab buildings of the refugees and the poor. Somewhere in the middle sits Downtown, where its older buildings house (fake) DVD shops, jewellers galore and some pleasant little humus joints & narghile cafés, along-side the odd Roman ruin.

Sayyida Zeinab [i] (سيدة زينب ١)

After having visited Iran last year, my first trip to a Muslim country, I had a rather skewed idea of what most mosques resemble. The mosques there are incredibly ornate affairs, with highly decorated interiors, and the exterior decorated with turquoise blue tiles and adorned in intricate Arabic calligraphy. This is not the norm in the majority of mosques I have seen since.

The district of Sayyida Zeinab, to the south of Damascus, attracts bus-loads of Iranian pilgrims to visit the large Shi’ite mosque there, which houses the shrine of Sayyida Zeinab — granddaughter of Mohammed — from whom the district takes its name. I was therefore interested to see what this Iranian-built mosque resembled.

The district was also the site of a recent incident here in the Syrian capital. I was at university on the morning of the 3rd December, when fellow classmates began receiving concerned text messages: “Are you ok? There has been a bomb-blast in Damascus.”

Western news reported this explosion, citing the name of the area, but to friends & family back home, the only name that registered was Damascus, where their loved ones were currently residing.

I immediately checked the news when I got out of class, where the BBC & the Guardian were reporting that there was an explosion on a bus carrying Iranian pilgrims to Sayyida Zeinab, but that reporters were not allowed near the site.

As the day progressed, the information was revised; the Syrian officials initially reporting that no-one had died, but the last I heard, it was 6 dead. The official line was that a tyre on the bus exploded whilst being inflated. Word on the street here in Damascus was that foul play was at work. The event also coincided with the visit of Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator. Conspiracy theories abound.

When I first considered coming to Syria, some people close to me reacted with “are you out of your mind?” and to a certain extent, I can see why. The only articles mentioning Syria in the news recently relate to things like Damascus being where senior figures met to plan recent explosions in Iraq, that the Palestinian leaders of Hamas reside here, and then this, the first explosion since September 2008. Yet being here, this sort of thing never crosses my mind. The place feels incredibly safe, and the people very warm and friendly. Frankly, I feel more threatened walking through parts of London or Paris than I ever do here.

Hamburg

I haven’t seen Riø in ages, and it’s been a while since I’ve visited to Germany.

Hop! A night train to Hamburg for the weekend.

Good times.

برج آزادی

Arriving in to Tehran after an overnight bus from Yazd, I was greeted by the Azadi Tower at dawn.

Then I had to battle with the Tehrani taxi-drivers… Not easy.

Yazd | یزد

Following Isfahan, I took a bus 175 miles accross the desert to Yazd, a city with a history going back 3000 years, and which was on the Silk Road.

The city has its heart in the Old Town, which hosts one of the largest networks of qanats in the world, and many of the houses are cooled by the wind towers for which the town is known.

Outside of town there is the Zorostrian Towers of Silence, where, up until the 1960s, the Zorostrians laid their dead.

Beyazıt Camii

Sultanahmet, Istanbul.

Monolith

Manhatten, New York.

Seven Sisters style Soviet architecture in Warsaw. August 2007 en route to Moscow.