From the Sunday Times Travel Magazine

It’s our very first day in Damascus, and the boom of nearby explosions jolts me from a jet-lagged afternoon doze. Already picturing the dramatic BBC headlines,

I head into the hotel’s courtyard, followed seconds later by my mother. The watchman – astonished by the sight of two blondes in pyjamas – explains that it’s just the Ramadan cannons signalling the end of the day’s fast. I murmur an embarrassed apology, but fortunately Mohammed is already too busy devouring his sesame flatbread to notice.

You might think visiting Syria during Ramadan is about as sensible as booking a Caribbean beach jaunt in hurricane season. This is, after all, the month when Muslims abstain from food (and drink and, indeed, sex) from dawn until dusk every day – and it’s considered polite for visitors to do the same.

But, bizarrely, it’s during Ramadan that Syria’s culinary prowess really comes to the boil. Each day’s fast ends with a feast: mezze platters, and plates piled high with charcoal-grilled kebabs, walnut-stuffed aubergines and honey-drenched baklava.

Even if you can’t make it here during Ramadan, Syria’s astonishing history makes it fascinating at any time of the year. There’s no ‘busy peak season’ to avoid (9/11 saw to that), and what was once a steady stream of tourists has dwindled to a trickle. On the positive side, that means ruins to rival Greece’s finest can be yours – practically tourist-free.

To those arriving by air at night, Damascus looks something like a flight deck – the winking green lights of mosques picked out amid the orange glow of shops and homes, with a cluster of neon blue marking the Christian quarter (Syrian Christians have a fondness for giant illuminated crucifixes).

Dawn, however, reveals the world’s oldest continually inhabited city in all its chaotic glory – a tangle of ancient streets encircled these days by dusty concrete office blocks. On every corner, hollering street-sellers with wheelbarrows full of football-sized pomegranates compete with the belligerent honks of battered Mercs and canary-yellow taxis. At the heart of Damascus, the old city’s slender alleys and hairpin bends deter all but the most determined drivers and life rolls on much as it has for the past few centuries.

We thread our way though the cat’s cradle of streets to the Umayyad mosque – one of Islam’s holiest shrines. Waves of civilisations have stamped their mark on this sacred spot. Temples and churches have been built, sacked, rebuilt, destroyed and built again, one on top of the other.

In fact, everything in Syria seems to have been constructed on the crumbling remnants of a previous civilisation – layers and layers of history are piled up like the multi-tiered baklava pastries stacked in the windows of the sweet shops.

On the site where the Umayyad mosque now stands, the Arameans founded a temple to their god of sun and thunder, Hadad, more than 3,000 years ago. The Romans followed, outdoing them with a gigantic temple to Jupiter, which has long since crumbled to dust, save for some magnificent pillared remains that still stand at the entrance to the souk.

Then came the Christians and, most recently (a relative term in Syrian history), the Muslims, who spent a decade creating a mosque of epic proportions in around AD636. Invading Mongols, earthquakes and fire have tarnished some of its sheen, but its grand scale and soaring minarets still leave you speechless.

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