Syria’s Odyssey

By a remarkable coincidence, a visit to the house where Pablo Picasso was born made me reflect on what might be called the Syrian “Odyssey” – borrowing, of course, from the great Greek epic whose latest cinematic adaptation is now showing in cinemas.

When the city authorities carried out excavations to strengthen the foundations of Picasso’s childhood home, they stumbled upon a major historical discovery: beneath the Picasso family residence lay another house, dating from the distant past.

Archaeological investigation established that its inhabitants had been Phoenicians, members of that genuinely pioneering eastern people who founded some of their earliest trading settlements in Málaga, on Spain’s southern coast, around the ninth century BC.

The Greeks – the people to whom Odysseus, also known as Ulysses, belonged – gave the Phoenicians their name when they first appeared in the poetry of Homer between the eighth and seventh centuries BC. Yet scholarship identifies them as part of the Canaanite culture that had flourished across the Levant since the third millennium BC.

Phoenecian cities had been inhabited since the Early Bronze Age and became thriving commercial centres, linked by sea and land to Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Greece and the countries of both the northern and southern Mediterranean. It was the Greeks who gave the region the name “Syria”.

The arrival of Arab and Amazigh Muslims in Andalusia – beginning in 711, when the southern Iberian Peninsula was brought into the Umayyad Caliphate – might therefore be regarded as another wave of migration, or a “redeployment”, nearly 18 centuries after those first Phoenician journeys.

The Palestinian-Syrian novelist and researcher Taysir Khalaf – himself a refugee and displaced person, born in Quneitra – offers an illuminating historical and genetic perspective on this ceaseless movement between the Mediterranean’s eastern and western shores.

The ancient Andalusians, he argues, were a mixture of Phoenician, Vandal and Celtic peoples. It was they who allowed the Muslims to enter with scarcely any fighting, seeking relief from Roman oppression. Most subsequently embraced Islam. Castile and the Castilians then conquered Andalusia, imposing their language and religion upon its people. Most of the Andalusian Muslims expelled for refusing to renounce their faith were therefore indigenous Andalusians, not Arabs.

According to The Odyssey, the Trojan War lasted 10 years. Odysseus then spent another 10 wandering before he could return to his home in Ithaca.

Syria’s Trojan War lasted for more than 13 years. During it, Syrians endured the greatest migration in either their ancient or modern history. According to United Nations figures, more than six million people fled the country, seeking refuge first in neighbouring states before dispersing across Europe and the wider world. The UN refugee agency estimated that a further seven million were displaced within Syria itself.

The 2022 Netflix film The Swimmers, starring Nathalie and Manal Issa and directed by Sally El Hosaini, told the true story of Yusra and Sara Mardini. In 2018, the sisters undertook the perilous adventure of “illegal” migration to Greece and then Germany, pursuing their dream of competing in the Olympic Games. There is a poignancy in this renewal of the ancient bond between Syria and Greece. One of the sisters, Sara, remained on trial in Greece on charges of smuggling migrants until January 2026, when the court – influenced, it would seem, by the worldwide attention her case had attracted – acquitted her.

In 2015, the Italian director Antonio Augugliaro and the Palestinian-Syrian publisher and poet Khaled Soliman Al Nassiry devised a story as extraordinary as those of millions of Syrians.

Together with a group of Italians, they decided to take a calculated legal risk in order to help a group of five Syrian and Palestinian refugees they had met in Italy to reach Sweden. Their scheme rested upon an idea so audacious that, they hoped, it would disarm the suspicions of border officials: they disguised the journey as a wedding party.

Abdullah, the supposed groom, was a young Palestinian whose boat had reached the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013. The imaginary bride was a young woman named Tasneem, displaced from Yarmouk refugee camp. Abdullah had nearly died beneath a heap of corpses. He survived only because some last reserve of strength caused his hand to rise high enough for rescuers to spot it.

Abdullah told the story of a Palestinian-Syrian refugee girl whom he had taught a song the day before she drowned. The film also featured the poets Raed Wahesh, Mohammad Al-Matroud and Tammam Hunaidi, whose recent death from cancer in Germany was mourned by Syrians everywhere.

Nassiry, the film’s director and one of those who later paid tribute to Hunaidi, was filmed learning that he had been granted Italian citizenship. He burst into tears.

“For the first time,” he said, “I carry a nationality in my pocket”.

Like the adventures recounted in The Odyssey, the stories of Syrians fleeing their country abound in horror, criminality, black comedy and surreal twists of fate.

One man disguised himself as a rabbi. Others attempted to cross the sea wearing frogmen’s suits. Another was “honoured” by his smuggler with a forged passport bearing the identity of Lithuania’s prime minister – an act of generosity that promptly led to his discovery.

Many Syrians were persecuted in Arab countries. In Algeria, they were labelled “terrorists” because they had fled a state supposedly committed to resisting imperialism.

In Tunisia, a minister in the Islamist-led government of Ali Laarayedh smeared women who had taken part in the struggle against Bashar al-Assad’s regime with the slander of “sexual jihad”.

In Egypt, Syrians encountered forms of affection and welcome – until the Assad regime fell, when the stereotypes abruptly changed.

Some reached Britain by a terrifying route through Africa and Europe. Many died in the attempt. Others found breathing space in Latin America, or sanctuary in the furthest reaches of Asia and Oceania.

I have watched these stories unfold within my own family.

I fled Assad’s Syria 36 years ago. In the years that followed, I witnessed the successive departures of my relatives.

My only brother’s family travelled overland and by train along the route opened to Syrians heading towards Germany under the great Chancellor Angela Merkel. My mother joined my three sisters, who live in the United States.

She would implore us to take her back to her abandoned house in Damascus. She would say that my father – who had died several years earlier – was waiting for her at the door.

My mother, Dalal Al-Halabi, was herself the daughter of migrants who had left northern Syria two centuries ago.

She died in America and was buried at Chicago Heights.