Deir Atiyah

A town between the Qalamoun mountains and the eastern Lebanon range, at the edge of the Damascus-Homs road. It sits at 1250 metres and the desert is close: rainfall does not pass 125 millimetres a year and the soil is thin. The whole story of Deir Atiyah is in those two facts. It is a place built around water because water is scarce, and a place that has been sending its people abroad for a century because the land cannot hold them.

Getting there

10 kilometres north of Nebek, a quarter of an hour. From Damascus it is 88 kilometres. The Damascus-Homs road runs along the edge of the town, and you turn off it and drop into the centre.

How long it takes

Two hours, taking in the centre, the museum and the gardens along the valley.

What is there

Groundwater under the valley keeps the town alive, and what lifts it out of the wells is not electricity but wind. Windmills stand scattered around the town, have turned for more than a hundred years, and still pump the water that the farming runs on. Who built them and when is not recorded; there is no paperwork, only the wheels. The gardens grow grapes, apricots, cherries and figs.

In the town

Deir Atiyah has its own museum, counted among the fullest local museums in Rif Dimashq: the everyday objects, dress and handwork of the region are gathered there. A separate church museum, a cultural centre and the old bath below the market are all in the centre too. North of the town stands the University of Kalamoon, opened in 2003 as the first private university in Syria.

What most people miss

Mate. The everyday drink here is not tea but mate, and that is not a curiosity but the trace of a migration: families who went to the Americas in the early 20th century brought the habit home. “Come and drink mate” means more than a cup here; it is an invitation to eat. If you are asked, sit down.

The name, and the town today

The name is said to come from a Roman or Byzantine official called Theodorus, “gift of God”, which in Arabic is Ataallah. In 1838 the town held mostly Sunni Muslims and Antiochian Greek Christians, and the 2004 census recorded 11 thousand people. In 2013 there was a bombing and a short spell of fighting; the town changed hands and was retaken within a week.