Jubb’adin

A village inside the Qalamoun, 6 kilometres from Maaloula. What brings you here is not a building but a sound: Western Aramaic is spoken today in two villages, and this is one of them. The other is Maaloula. The third village, Bakhaa, was broken up in the war and its community has not come back.

What the language is doing here

Jubb’adin is entirely Sunni Muslim and its people trace themselves to Aramean descent; the village converted to Islam in the 18th century. So Western Aramaic here is not a church inheritance but a household language. That detail matters, because the language is usually assumed to survive with Christian communities. Even the big mosque in the village has an Aramaic name: Jemaa Rab, “the large mosque”. Most of the young are bilingual, Aramaic at home and Damascus Arabic outside. This is also where modern Aramaic poetry is written; the village has its poets.

Getting there

63 kilometres north-east of Damascus, about an hour and twenty minutes. Maaloula is 6 kilometres away, and the two fit comfortably into one day, which is also the right way to see them, because the point is that both speak the same language. Saidnaya is 22 kilometres to the south-west. Public transport is thin and you need a car.

How long it takes

An hour. The village is small and there is no list of monuments; the work is walking and listening.

How to behave

Do not ask for anything. Asking someone in the village to “say something in Aramaic” happens often and it grates: a person speaking their own language is not putting on a show. You will hear it anyway, in the street, in a shop, among the children. If someone wants to explain, they will. The same measure applies to photographs; a photograph of a person needs permission.

Around it

The village is high and cooler than most of Syria; summer evenings ask for a layer. Yabroud is 38 kilometres to the north-east, and Assal al-Ward lies to the north-west. The 2004 census recorded 3778 people; estimates for 2019 put the figure between 8 thousand and 10 thousand.