Around Umm Qais...
I totally can't wait to be off for Morocco in a few months. I haven't been outside the country except for a brief vacation in Canada since 2001. There's so much to see, so many people to meet, and so much to be learned about them. Just last night I was talking to a friend about my hopes to possibly duck into Western Sahara. When I was in Jordan, I sent back e-mails to my friends discussing my observations and experiences, something I hope to repeat this summer on this blog. The post from last weekend about the kids learning English in Aleppo was excerpted from these, which I've been glancing at to tide me over. Anyway, here's another about our group trip to Umm Qays, on which we also saw the point at which Jordan, Israel and Syria all meet...
"To really understand a lot of this stuff, however, you need to leave Irbid behind and travel northwest, into the hills adjacent to the Jordan Valley and the Sea of Galilee. This is the breadbasket of Jordan, where fields are fertile (by Middle Eastern standards), the heart of Jordanian olive country, where, I am told, a row of about a dozen or so trees can get those lucky enough to farm them about $50,000 a year. Here along the roads are numerous small towns where children play around in the streets, and where a bus will have to go around a farmer driving goats or donkeys in front of it, a large wedding party conveying the groom to the bride's house, and where every so often you have to stop at a Jordanian military checkpoint, or at least slow until they wave you past.
"A good view of the area can be had from the small town of Umm Qais. Here there is a new, modern town covering most of a hillside, with the minarets of the mosques reaching skyward and streets buzzing with the sounds of human habitation. The place you will stop, however, is one hill over, in the old city, now abandoned to make room for archeological excavations of the ancient Roman city of Gadara which lies beneath. Gadara was founded sometime in the first millennium BCE, one of the cities of the Decapolis with Arbila, Damascus, Gerasa, Philadelphia, etc. Its streets, still paved with the original Roman stones complete with wagon ruts, preserve the record of the city's ages, through the days of the Roman gods to the time of Christianity and a Byzantine Church to the days of the Umayyads, before the city was destroyed by a great earthquake in 749. Thereafter the site lay deserted until, I believe, Ottoman times, when the village of Umm Qais was founded on its ruins, with the pieces of Gadara being used by its inhabitants in the construction of their new dwellings.
"Today Umm Qais looks and feels like a ghost town, preserving the small, dark-colored oblong buildings of the Arab townspeople who were moved into the new town much earlier this century. On its streets, built with occasional steps in an age before automobiles, one can feel back in time to the days when the carts and donkeys and merchants and farmers went here about their business, actors of one great civilization carrying out their activities in the shadow of another and atop its ruins. The city of Gadara, too, borrows some of this feel, and although it is not as intact as either the Arab village or Gerasa to the South, it, too had life one can sense strolling casually down the main thoroughfare on a quiet Friday morning, taking in the feel of this place most known today for the Chrisitian story of a demon called Legion and a herd of swine. And even this city still has a bit of lived-in feel to it, as a family from somewhere around here comes to picnic in the ampitheater and a few children run around a street which we think used to be a marketplace.
"Overlooking these treasures is a small restaurant where someone - I forget who - bought us all tea and coffee. This restaurant has an outside terrace from which one can see beyond the hills over to the Sea of Galilee, of which about 25% is visible on a good day, peeking out behind the Golan Heights in a hazy mist of blue against the green land all around. A closer view of this is necessary to bring out the things I'm eventually going to bring out; this can be obtained by taking the road down from Umm Qais to a nearby spot far below sea level from which this perhaps hottest of hotspots can be seen in greater detail.
"Imagine if you will, a large valley shaped like a wedge falling away at your feet. In the distance across the valley is the Golan Heights, which appears to be essentially a large pile of dirt with a Syrian observation post seen dimly in the distance. Bisecting this valley as it flows out of Syria to join the Jordan just below the Sea of Galilee is the Yarmouk River, which near the mouth looks like Emory Creek during a flood. Next to this river is a road lined on one side by a barbed-wire fence, with sand along the curb; this fence is the Israeli border, and the Israelis run daily patrols to make sure the sand has not been disturbed, a sign that someone has crossed illegally.
"Crossing this river and road is an old railroad bridge of the Hejazi line connecting Istanbul and Mecca; this was frequently attacked by the Hashemites and Lawrence of Arabia during World War I. Today it cuts through a no-man's land passing next to a hill upon which is a small round building which may hold about three people; this is an Israeli observation post; a slightly larger one is just up the hill. Just below your feet is a road where a Jordanian soldier walks his rounds near a Jordanian observation post. In the no-man's land are a few farms, the owners of which must each day pass through a series of military checkpoints before tending their fields.
"Somewhat further away, perhaps approaching the open end of the wedge's V, is a series of swamplike pools and plush green patches next to a white mosque. This is a crocodile farm located right at the edge of Israeli territory; the mosque now serves the farm as a storage facility. Just beyond the farm is a small grove of trees; somewhere in these trees is the triangle point at which Jordan, Syria, and Israel all meet. This somewhat surreal place holds the keys to some of the key aspects of our lives in Jordan. The Yarmouk River is divided by a dam; as the river flows into the Jordan half its water is destined to provide for northern Israel; after the 1994 peace treaty the other half was diverted into a cement-sided channel to northern Jordan. That's not a lot of water to go around. And the Golan Heights is the place where two days ago the Israelis sent in the tanks, adding a bit more force to one of the only borders in the world where two armies face each other, always on alert to resume on the ground the war that still exists on paper. "
"To really understand a lot of this stuff, however, you need to leave Irbid behind and travel northwest, into the hills adjacent to the Jordan Valley and the Sea of Galilee. This is the breadbasket of Jordan, where fields are fertile (by Middle Eastern standards), the heart of Jordanian olive country, where, I am told, a row of about a dozen or so trees can get those lucky enough to farm them about $50,000 a year. Here along the roads are numerous small towns where children play around in the streets, and where a bus will have to go around a farmer driving goats or donkeys in front of it, a large wedding party conveying the groom to the bride's house, and where every so often you have to stop at a Jordanian military checkpoint, or at least slow until they wave you past.
"A good view of the area can be had from the small town of Umm Qais. Here there is a new, modern town covering most of a hillside, with the minarets of the mosques reaching skyward and streets buzzing with the sounds of human habitation. The place you will stop, however, is one hill over, in the old city, now abandoned to make room for archeological excavations of the ancient Roman city of Gadara which lies beneath. Gadara was founded sometime in the first millennium BCE, one of the cities of the Decapolis with Arbila, Damascus, Gerasa, Philadelphia, etc. Its streets, still paved with the original Roman stones complete with wagon ruts, preserve the record of the city's ages, through the days of the Roman gods to the time of Christianity and a Byzantine Church to the days of the Umayyads, before the city was destroyed by a great earthquake in 749. Thereafter the site lay deserted until, I believe, Ottoman times, when the village of Umm Qais was founded on its ruins, with the pieces of Gadara being used by its inhabitants in the construction of their new dwellings.
"Today Umm Qais looks and feels like a ghost town, preserving the small, dark-colored oblong buildings of the Arab townspeople who were moved into the new town much earlier this century. On its streets, built with occasional steps in an age before automobiles, one can feel back in time to the days when the carts and donkeys and merchants and farmers went here about their business, actors of one great civilization carrying out their activities in the shadow of another and atop its ruins. The city of Gadara, too, borrows some of this feel, and although it is not as intact as either the Arab village or Gerasa to the South, it, too had life one can sense strolling casually down the main thoroughfare on a quiet Friday morning, taking in the feel of this place most known today for the Chrisitian story of a demon called Legion and a herd of swine. And even this city still has a bit of lived-in feel to it, as a family from somewhere around here comes to picnic in the ampitheater and a few children run around a street which we think used to be a marketplace.
"Overlooking these treasures is a small restaurant where someone - I forget who - bought us all tea and coffee. This restaurant has an outside terrace from which one can see beyond the hills over to the Sea of Galilee, of which about 25% is visible on a good day, peeking out behind the Golan Heights in a hazy mist of blue against the green land all around. A closer view of this is necessary to bring out the things I'm eventually going to bring out; this can be obtained by taking the road down from Umm Qais to a nearby spot far below sea level from which this perhaps hottest of hotspots can be seen in greater detail.
"Imagine if you will, a large valley shaped like a wedge falling away at your feet. In the distance across the valley is the Golan Heights, which appears to be essentially a large pile of dirt with a Syrian observation post seen dimly in the distance. Bisecting this valley as it flows out of Syria to join the Jordan just below the Sea of Galilee is the Yarmouk River, which near the mouth looks like Emory Creek during a flood. Next to this river is a road lined on one side by a barbed-wire fence, with sand along the curb; this fence is the Israeli border, and the Israelis run daily patrols to make sure the sand has not been disturbed, a sign that someone has crossed illegally.
"Crossing this river and road is an old railroad bridge of the Hejazi line connecting Istanbul and Mecca; this was frequently attacked by the Hashemites and Lawrence of Arabia during World War I. Today it cuts through a no-man's land passing next to a hill upon which is a small round building which may hold about three people; this is an Israeli observation post; a slightly larger one is just up the hill. Just below your feet is a road where a Jordanian soldier walks his rounds near a Jordanian observation post. In the no-man's land are a few farms, the owners of which must each day pass through a series of military checkpoints before tending their fields.
"Somewhat further away, perhaps approaching the open end of the wedge's V, is a series of swamplike pools and plush green patches next to a white mosque. This is a crocodile farm located right at the edge of Israeli territory; the mosque now serves the farm as a storage facility. Just beyond the farm is a small grove of trees; somewhere in these trees is the triangle point at which Jordan, Syria, and Israel all meet. This somewhat surreal place holds the keys to some of the key aspects of our lives in Jordan. The Yarmouk River is divided by a dam; as the river flows into the Jordan half its water is destined to provide for northern Israel; after the 1994 peace treaty the other half was diverted into a cement-sided channel to northern Jordan. That's not a lot of water to go around. And the Golan Heights is the place where two days ago the Israelis sent in the tanks, adding a bit more force to one of the only borders in the world where two armies face each other, always on alert to resume on the ground the war that still exists on paper. "
posted by Brian Ulrich at
10:34 PM
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