A Journey to Damascus: The City, the Books, the People, and a Little Politics

A Journey to Damascus: The City, the Books, the People, and a Little Politics

When I asked the man seated beside me in the gardens of Damascus’s Fairgrounds why such a human tide had descended upon the Book Fair, his wife answered before he could speak. “We were suffocating,” she said, with an intensity that suggested a sentiment long pent up since the fall of the Assad regime. He added that the matter extended beyond books. Had the event been a food or industrial exhibition, he believed the turnout would have been the sa…