Syria Culture & Language

Syria sits where the Mediterranean, Mesopotamia and Arabia meet, and its culture has been absorbing and exporting for five thousand years.

Writing itself

At Ugarit on the coast, scribes were using a thirty-letter cuneiform alphabet by the fourteenth century BC — among the earliest alphabets known, and an ancestor of the idea behind every alphabet since. The clay tablet listing the letters in order is effectively the world’s oldest abecedary.

Architecture

The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus set the template for congregational mosques and still holds its eighth-century golden mosaics. Damascene courtyard houses turn inward around a fountain and a citrus tree, and the inlaid furniture, brocade and mosaic woodwork of the city are named after it in several languages.

Christian antiquity

Some of the oldest continuous Christian communities anywhere, with liturgy in Syriac, and Aramaic still spoken in a few villages around Maaloula.

Food

Aleppo is the acknowledged centre — kibbeh in dozens of forms, muhammara of red pepper and walnut, cherry kebab in season — alongside the mezze, fattoush, yabrak and ice cream pounded with mastic that Damascus is known for.

Music and the spoken word

The Levantine muwashshah tradition and the Aleppine qudud are sung forms with roots going back to Andalusia, and Aleppo was long regarded as the city where an Arabic singer’s reputation was made or lost, before an audience that knew the repertoire well enough to correct you. Poetry carries comparable weight, and Nizar Qabbani and Adonis are read across the Arab world.

Heritage at risk

All six of Syria’s World Heritage sites were placed on the danger list during the war, and looting and deliberate destruction did damage that will take generations to address.

Arabic is the official language, in a Levantine dialect that is widely understood across the region and is the accent of a great deal of Arabic television and drama.

Kurdish is spoken by a large population in the north and north-east. Armenian, Syriac, Turkmen and Circassian are spoken by established communities, and a form of Aramaic survives in a few villages around Maaloula — among the last places where the language of the Gospels is a living tongue.

English is spoken by younger and educated Syrians and in the tourism trade; French persists among the older generation from the mandate period. Outside those groups, expect little, and a guide or interpreter is part of how most visits work anyway.

Useful: as-salamu alaykum, shukran for thank you, min fadlak for please, ahlan wa sahlan for welcome — which you will hear constantly.