If you can’t make the pilgrimage to Mecca, the Umayyad mosque is considered a worthy alternative, and Muslims travel from all over to pay their respects. It makes for something of a cultural fashion show – North Africans in elaborate headdresses, Gulf Arabs in red-and-white checked dishdashes, weathered women from the countryside with embroidered caps and white veils.

No such luck for us, however. We are ushered away from the main entrance and into a musty annexe marked ‘Putting on Special Clothes Room’. Anticipating some sort of panto costume closet, we are handed two monk-like brown robes with cowled hoods. We fail to stifle giggles and float into the mosque, trying to keep the gowns from flapping open as ladies in sleek black chadors glide by.

Crossing the vast courtyard, the marble is cool beneath our bare feet. Walls glimmer with exquisite gold and green mosaics while above us minarets reach skywards. Despite the grandeur, there’s something of a summer-festival feel.

Families with rugs and picnics (small children are exempt from Ramadan fasting) have set up camp for the afternoon, kids perform cartwheels and play tag, and octagenarians with faces gnarled like walnuts doze in the sunshine. Inside, prayer halls go on for miles – thickly carpeted, heavy with chandeliers – and people pray quietly, kneeling and rising rhythmically as they murmur.

Back out in the bright sunshine, we find boys setting up piles of warm flatbread in the courtyard, the aroma of cooking on the afternoon breeze cruelly taunting our empty stomachs. At sunset, when the day’s fast is broken (cue more alarming cannons), the poor and needy of Damascus flood into the mosque for a free supper.

That’s still some hours off, though, as we emerge from the mosque, so we head to the souk and find ourselves swept along in a river of people flowing through a vaulted arcade. Shafts of light, from bulletholes in the roof left by the French back in 1945, pierce the gloom.

A natural-born shopper, even my mother is overwhelmed. ‘You wouldn’t want to ask them to put something aside while you thought about it. You’d never ever find it again,’ she sighs, as we pass a cubby-hole of a shop stuffed with a rainbow of kilims.

Shoes, veils, watches, carpets, electrical goods, spices and kitchenware – it’s all here. It’s a good place to start before heading to the granddaddy of all souks, in Aleppo, another centuries-old city to the north, where the only way to find your route out is to head vaguely uphill and hope to glimpse daylight. Here, lamb and goat carcasses hang in the pungent meat section, with kidneys and other bits displayed in silver bowls – it’s considered good practice to have a poke around before choosing.

In Damascus, though, the most popular stall is the one festooned with lacy lingerie, where ladies in head-to-toe black chadors are testing the elastic on industrial-sized bloomers and examining bondage-style leather bras.

Small boys tug at our sleeves, trying to sell us mosque-shaped alarm clocks (which wake you with a piercing call to prayer), sparkly bangles and mini leather-bound Qur’ans. Their sales patter only ceases when my mother tests out her smattering of Arabic. They completely forget to sell us anything. ‘You from Cairo? You have Egyptian accent,’ says one – even though Mum hails from Sussex.

We spread out our purchases back in the courtyard oasis of Beit Al Mamlouka – the city’s first boutique retreat, tucked away behind the heavy wooden doors of a converted Ottoman mansion. Birds are bathing in the fountain as the haunting muezzin wail begins. While the rest of Damascus attends evening prayers, May, the hotel’s elegantly coiffed owner, suggests that we indulge in that other great national pastime: the hammam.

Syrians wouldn’t dream of going a week without a thorough steam-clean at one of these tiled bath houses – it’s a tradition as old as the Roman ruins that litter the landscape.

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