Middle East - Anthony Ham [405]
Narcissus Palace (Map; 541 6785; noon-1am) Packed to its very attractive rafters with young people catching up over a nargileh and tea, Narcissus Palace features music clips blaring from the satellite TV, backgammon pieces clinking, the fountain gently playing and extremely friendly staff to make sure everyone is happy. Great stuff.
A number of restaurants double as coffeehouses in Old City buildings. The better ones include Leila’s Restaurant & Terrace (Click here), Bab al-Hara (Click here) and Beit Jabri (Click here).
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ENTERTAINMENT
Al-Nawfara Coffee Shop (The Fountain Coffee Shop; Map; Sharia al-Qaimariyya; 9am-midnight) Not only is this lovely old café an institution for imbibing tea and a nargileh, it’s the home of Syria’s last professional hakawati (storyteller). Every night after sunset prayers, Abu Shady takes to the stage to tell an epic tale of glorious days long past. Depending on the crowd, it can either be filled with banter or a little quiet as people come and go, often talking over the top of him. Either way, this is a Damascus must-see, not least because this is a dying art form (see boxed text opposite). A collection is taken near the end of the show.
The most popular nightclub in town is Marmar (Map; 544 6425; Sharia ad-Dawanneh; admission incl 3 drinks S£750; ), a bar-restaurant at Bab Touma that morphs into a club on Thursday and Friday nights and occasionally hosts live gigs on Sundays.
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END OF STORY? terry carter, lara dunston & anthony ham
In one of the tales in The Thousand and One Nights, a king commissions a merchant to seek out the most marvellous story ever. The merchant sends out his slaves on the quest and at last success is achieved – a slave hears a wondrous story told in Damascus by an old man who tells stories every day, seated on his storyteller’s throne. Jump forward several centuries, and in Damascus today there’s still an old man who tells stories every day, seated on just such a throne. His name is Abu Shady and he’s the last of the Syrian hakawati (professional storytellers).
Hakawati were a common feature of Middle Eastern city street life as far back as the 12th century. With the spread of coffee drinking during Ottoman times, the storytellers moved off the street and into the coffeehouses. As with many Arab traditions, the art of public storytelling has largely failed to survive the 20th century, supplanted in the coffeehouses first by radio, then by TV.
According to Abu Shady, the last professional storyteller before him in Syria went into retirement in the 1970s. As a boy, Abu Shady went with his father to watch the hakawati perform at the coffeehouses, and fell in love with stories. ‘It was my habit to read too much,’ he told us. ‘When I was young I would run away from my job at the library to read books.’ Abu Shady trained as a tailor but he would read every moment he could: Jean Paul Sartre, Victor Hugo, Ernest Hemingway, Khalil Gibran…
When the previous hakawati decided to retire and stop performing at Al-Nawfara Coffee Shop, its owner, Ahmed al-Rabat persuaded Abu Shady to take over, and in the early 1990s, he revived the profession. Since then, Abu Shady has been appearing nightly at Al-Nawfara in the shadows of the Umayyad Mosque. Costumed in baggy trousers and waistcoat with a tarboosh on his head, he recounts nightly from his volumes of handwritten tales. These include the legendary exploits of Sultan Beybars and Antar ibn Shadad, both Islamic heroes and – as Abu Shady tells it – regular doers of fantastic feats, sorcery and cunning roguery. He also invents his own stories, incorporating current events. The assembled listeners know the stories, but it’s Abu Shady’s delivery they come for: he interjects with jokes and comments, works the audience, punctuates the words with waves