The Historical Topography of Damascus and a Defining Turning Point #1
- Ezzat Baghdadi
- Apr 16
- 4 min read
Updated: 6 days ago
📘 This article is part of the series "Urban Transformation in Post-Colonial Cities: Damascus as a Case Study," which seeks to deconstruct the historical and political structure of urban transformation in Damascus, serving as a mirror of the urban crises facing cities across the Global South.
To understand the failure of urban transformation in Damascus, we must return to the city’s geographical and historical foundation. Damascus is a traditional city surrounded by a wall, founded in a fertile valley irrigated by the Barada River. Its geography defines it: to the east and west stretches the Ghouta—an intensive agricultural belt—and to the north and south it is enclosed by mountain ranges such as Qalamoun and Mount Hermon. This geography gave the city a clear division of roles: Damascus as the region’s mind, the Ghouta its heart, and the mountains its shield.
The Ghouta: Heart of the Rural System
The Ghouta is distributed along both sides of the Barada River:
The Barada basin was reserved for seasonal agriculture according to inherited customary laws, with building prohibited.
The upper banks of the Barada—elevated from the river—were planted with vineyards and almond trees and not irrigated directly.
Rain-fed villages emerged on flood slopes and higher lands, forming a light-density rural fabric complementary to the valley and its slopes.
At the city’s main entrance near the Citadel, the Marjeh (meadow) served as an open plain for grazing horses and holding seasonal markets. The name stems from the practice of leaving the land untouched to grow naturally—wild grass and flowers—creating a spatial margin that separated the city wall from cultivated lands. Marjeh was a transitional zone between the urban and rural, between political rigidity and ecological fluidity.
Agricultural Customary Law: The Charter of Balance
What made this geographical structure a stable socio-political entity wasn’t just its resources but a rich customary agricultural system, which acted as law and governance in the absence of a modern state. This was not improvised tradition but a coherent moral-political system—the community’s unwritten constitution.
These customs included:
Organizing sale cycles, crops, harvest timing, and water rights.
Prohibiting construction in the basin to protect water flow and distribution.
Preserving collective land ownership and preventing fragmentation.
Governing social life: marriage, inheritance, conflict resolution, and sacred months.
Ensuring environmental sustainability: no soil-depleting or water-hoarding crops.
Assigning collective responsibilities like protecting the land, maintaining irrigation, and building roads.
This system balanced wealth generation with environmental and social responsibility and imposed moral limits on authority; no ruler could violate it without losing legitimacy or provoking communal resistance.
The Urban-Rural Stratification around Damascus
Based on this integrated customary-ecological logic, Damascus developed with clear and orderly spatial layers:
First ring – inside the wall: the traditional city with markets, artisans, religious institutions, and storage facilities, protected by fortified walls.
Second ring – the “karmeh”: cultivated slopes planted with trees like figs, vines, and almonds, protected by custom from encroachment.
Third ring – the mountains: natural climatic buffer protecting the valley from urban sprawl and ecological imbalance.
The Terraces (Masatib): Zones of Sovereign Intrusion and External Control
On the fringes of the valley and at the foot of the mountains, terraces (masatib) emerged—elevated flat lands formed by silt deposits. Their geographic features made them ideal for military camps and imperial negotiations:
Elevated yet accessible.
Composed of solid gravel and sandy soil—dry and easy to settle.
Often located at crossroads of imperial roads.
Used as observation and defense points in wartime, or for taxation and storage in peacetime.
Key terraces in Damascus:
🔹 Qaboun TerraceLocated between Qaboun and Barzeh, along the slope of Mount Barzeh. It has historically marked the friction point between state and city. As documented by Ibn Tulun, the Ottomans destroyed the Mamluk palace here and expelled the residents of its two villages to take control of the strategic road linking Damascus with the north. Later, the British fortified part of it as a military compound housing Special Forces, police academies, and military police.
🔹 Salhieh Terrace (Al-Muhajireen)On the western slopes, Governor Nazim Pasha built a palace here in 1899—known today as the Presidential Palace. He received German Emperor Wilhelm II here in a symbolic act of imperial authority. Over time, this terrace came to represent centralized power as Damascus began shifting politically from Anatolian influence to that of the Eastern Mediterranean.
These terraces are not just geographical forms; they mark a political shift—from locally rooted governance via customary law to modern state centralization that imposed control from above without effective modernization or restoration of imperial legitimacy.
The late Ottoman state began settling displaced people from the empire’s peripheries around these terraces as a human shield—especially after the rise in tribal raids following the 1858 Land Code. These settlements were weakly structured, gradually transforming into informal zones—what would later become known as the “peripheries of cancer.”
The Moment of Rupture: The 1858 Land Code and the Collapse of Custom
The long-standing balance began to unravel with the issuance of the 1858 Ottoman Land Code—a legal bomb detonated in the heart of the customary system:
It encouraged individual ownership.
Opened the door to land speculation.
Dissolved communal ties in favor of market logic.
What we see today—informality, loss of spatial identity, and disordered urban growth—is not merely a product of war, but a historical trajectory that began with the erosion of communal norms and the replacement of shared governance with private property and speculative development.
Customary agricultural law was not folklore—it was a living system that regulated land, labor, and community futures. Without it, the Ghouta collapsed, the countryside became detached from the city, and we entered an era of chaotic ownership and dysfunctional urban planning.
🧭 In the next article, we will explore the 1858 Land Code in depth as a critical turning point in the legal and spatial history of Damascus—revealing how the breakdown of custom reshaped the relationship between the city, its countryside, and the state.
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