“Bless them, O Lord, as You blessed Abraham and Sarah. … Bless them, O Lord, as You blessed Joachim and Anna.”
The priest of the church in Jaramana, which is mostly Orthodox Christian, said the above verse as he presided over the marriage of a young couple from his flock. That was on a Sunday last September. Sinda and Tarek had been planning this moment for the past three years. But it never occurred to them that they would be getting married under the sound of bullets and shelling, and a growing feeling among the people of Jaramana that their future with their Muslim neighbors was no longer guaranteed.
Before the start of the events in Syria, Jaramana was for Damascus what Ashrafieh is to Beirut. Both Jaramana and Ashrafieh have a heavy Orthodox Christian presence in a mostly Muslim capital. Ashrafieh has a civil and bourgeois Orthodox Christian character amid a rural Lebanese Christian region, and Jaramana is similar in that regard relative to Damascus and its countryside. Jaramana’s restaurants, nightclubs and the arrival of Iraqi Christian capitalists made the town the go-to place for nightlife, even more so than Ashrafieh.
Few Iraqis remain in Jaramana as they were the first to leave Syria. The Iraqi Christians sensed, before the other Christians did, that what happened to them in Iraq was being repeated now in Syria.
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