Things to Do in Damascus in January

January is likely the best time to see Damascus's Old City without the press of crowds that will return as the city keeps reopening. The Umayyad Mosque, one of the oldest and largest mosques on earth, with a marble courtyard roughly 157 by 100 meters (515 by 328 feet), feels entirely different when you can sit for twenty minutes beside the Dome of the Eagle without being jostled. Straight Street (Via Recta), the Roman-era road slicing through the Old City from Bab Sharqi to Bab Kisan, is quieter in January morning light than at any other point in the year. The cold helps: fewer vendors, a slower pace, and the city's smell shifts from summer's dust and heat to something cleaner, damp stone, cedar, and occasionally the faint sweetness of orange blossom from courtyard trees that have not yet dropped their leaves. The surface underfoot is slick and uneven in places, so take your time.

Damascus has more surviving medieval courtyard houses, the dar al-Damascena, with its iwan arches, geometric tilework, and central fountain, than any other city in the Arab world, and in January you move through them with almost no one else present. Azem Palace, the 18th-century Ottoman governor's residence on the edge of the Old City, is the natural anchor: its reception halls have ceilings that took craftsmen years to complete, and the carved plasterwork (stucco decorated with floral patterns so intricate they look lace-like at a distance) is visible without craning over other visitors' shoulders. From Azem, the lanes toward Bab Touma reveal smaller private courtyards, some now operating as guesthouses or restaurants. The interiors run warmer than you would expect, thick stone walls retain heat and block wind better than any modern insulation, and the sound of rain on the stone fountain is one of the more evocative sounds Damascus produces.

The cold drives everyone inside in January, which is exactly where the souq is. The Hamidiyya arcade, built under Ottoman Sultan Abd al-Hamid II in the late 19th century, runs 600 meters (1,970 feet) under an iron-and-glass roof that filters gray winter light into something close to theatrical. On either side, stalls sell Damascene brocade (damask cloth, which takes its name from this city), silver filigree, and dried goods, the smell is an accumulation of cumin, rose water, and something faintly musty and wonderful from bolts of aged fabric. At the far end, the Umayyad Mosque looms. Off the main arcade, specialist souqs for copper, spices, and textiles run deeper into the Old City's medieval street plan, and January is when you will find artisans at work rather than resting, the slower season means craftspeople are in their workshops doing the slow, intricate work that summers interrupt.

January in Damascus turns every kitchen into a slow-cooker shrine. Menus shrink to gravity-defying stews: freekeh, smoked green wheat buried beneath lamb that collapses under the nudge of a spoon, moghrabieh the colour of garnet, its pearl couscous rolled with chicken and onions cooked to candy, and mulukhiyya, the ink-dark jute stew locals have spooned up for millennia. Gelatinous, faintly bitter, it hooks you after the third bite and never lets go. Behind Bab Touma, courtyard houses that have served food since Ottoman days glow with coal braziers and candle flame. Rain taps stone, locals crowd the benches, and tourists are thin enough that conversations cross the room in Arabic without anyone dropping their voice.

Maaloula clings 56 km (35 miles) northeast of Damascus on a 1,500 m (4,921 ft) ridge of the Qalamoun range, so January adds snow to the cliffs and a blade of wind to the air. The hour-long haul through the Anti-Lebanon hills rolls past pale limestone scarps, winter-bare pistachio orchards, and the odd falcon banking on updrafts above the spine of the mountains. Western Aramaic, the language of first-century Galilee, still rattles around these alleys, one of the planet's last pockets where it survives. The fourth-century monastery of Mar Sarkis (St. Sergius) is chiselled straight into the rock. Its altar, a curved stone slab older than the standing-altar norm, is among Christianity's earliest. Come winter the village empties, sound bounces off the cliffs, pine resin sharpens the cold air, and monks move through the chapels without hurry.

The National Museum of Damascus stacks 10,000 years of Syrian history under one roof, and January lets you take the escalators at your own speed, no flag-waving crowd to funnel you along. The rebuilt third-century Dura-Europos synagogue stops even the resolute: entire walls of painted scripture, reds, ochres, lapis that have outlived seventeen centuries, transferred here in the 1930s. Around the corner, the Ugaritic tablets, some of humanity's first alphabetic scratchings, sit in a gallery that might see twelve souls on a weekday. Budget three hours minimum. The building itself demands attention, eighth-century BCE basalt lions from Tell Halaf flanking the doorway like nightclub bouncers carved in black stone.