Journey Through Syrian Sands

Dr. Gagikyan (not real name) is a 64 year old chiropractor who is still working currently in the city of Glendale. Despite this he reflects back to the poor living conditions he had as a young teenager in Ashrafiyah, Syria in which times were hard. With a population of just two to three thousand people in the suburbs of Syria he made sure that his friends and family were there  to make time fly by. While he lived in an old and unsophisticated city he did not have many luxuries that many of us in this great country had. He had poor access to water, less recreation time and most importantly less education. He speaks of the many activities he has done, the cultural differences and the overall patience he had to have before coming to the United States. He tells me, “I do not regret leaving Syria to come to this great country.” Looking back he realizes what he has been through to be were he is.

I grew up in Ashrafiyah Syria, which is a small town in the suburb of Aleppo; Aleppo is the second largest city in Syria probably the population uhh almost one million now, but at that time the population was like four to six hundred thousand and the population in the small town that I am talking about Ashrafiyah, is about two to three thousand people. There were Armenians living there in the beginning and later gradually Arabs and Kurds built houses there also. The Armenians established there around the 1920s and the Syrian government gave land to the uhh Armenians who were thrown out of their lands like former Kilikia or Eastern Turkey which was part of Kilikia. So as I said, there were few hundred of them who built houses in Ashrafiyah and gradually became a small town of which now two to three thousand people.

In the beginning like in the early '20s, '30s and '40s the Armenians worshiped in the Armenian Church which is an Apostolic Church. Later there was a Protestant Church and small Protestant uhh school. Later, I think in the '50s when the Muslim and Arab community became larger they built a Mosque so the Kurdish and Arab population worshiped at the Mosque, and that was it. 

I had many friends that I remembered from kindergarten all the way to the high-school. We used to enjoy friendships because we had nothing else to do. There was no television of course and very few people had a radio to listen to and mainly we used play on the streets or there were small clubs were, we used to play basketball and soccer.

Umm ever town has heroes, you can mention the positive and the negative ones. Of course there were few, very few negative heroes mostly small  street gangsters but not compared  to today’s uhh street gangs, who were not very successful heroes, but the positive way there are of course many of them. One of them I remember, I’ll call him Mr. X, used to be the producer of an a  play group and he was a national, I mean not national but very famous hero in the community and I will not hide and say that he was my father. He used to put new plays every year and people were impatiently waiting when the day will come so they can watch it because there were no movie theaters so the play were theatric. There were other heroes that I remembered, like a couple more guys who became uhh very famous after they graduated high-school the local high-school now they are engineers working in the NASA space program.

As far as media goes, there was no local radio, no local newspaper but the only way that people knew about upcoming events were through local clubs and the heads of the community used to make announcements. There was this guy, how do you call it the street guy, the town crier yeah. Whenever we had an emergency, the town crier used to make the announcements “Ay people for the next three days your not going to have water or there will be no electricity.” In the beginning of course, there was no electricity in the town. We used candles, but later in the 1940s and 1950s the electricity was there and as I said the announcements were only mouth to mouth.

In our town there were no parks, the only recreation centers was as I said were the local club. It was like family style, people used to go there, just very  small festivities and they used to bring a cup of coffee and also there very small basketball courts and a soccer field so those were the main activities. The church used to have some gatherings especially during and after Christmas but they were very small dance parties.

We had no public libraries however there were very small libraries in the school that we used to have like the Armenian school. In the beginning, the church used to have a small library but if people needed any kind of literature they used to go to Aleppo; Aleppo of course was a larger city and it had a public library there.

There was no major crimes mainly stuff and the first punishment for the warning was given out by a Mukhtar that would be a town sheriff in our standards. Mukhtar used to warn the people in the beginning to behave and if they didn’t or if there was a more advanced crime, then he used to invite the police to take the parties to jail or the judge who will give them a jail sentence. I have never seen nor heard in our town anybody executed or uhh killed for making any crimes. Most of them were small crimes or minor thefts.

The stores contained mostly Syrian goods, but they used to have uhh a little bit European and American products, yeah products, cultural products but mainly Syrian. There were also no major restaurants mostly there were diners, small diners. There were only local cultural food and as I said they had the products of European some diners you will see Italian food maybe or French food, but mostly Syrian.

Syria  is mainly is agricultural and in our town we had very good land that was very good for farming. There were vegetables and later they built a small factory for suit production and that was it I mean no major industries there and as I said mostly agricultural because  we didn’t have much  to sell .There were no paved streets until mid 50s and we didn’t have sewers just sanitary tanks. The sewer system was built in like late 1950s and early ‘60s around those years roughly. Later they built paved streets mostly asphalts and I think now they have all asphalt streets concrete walls so it was easy.

My best experience was my primitive poor teenage life there. As I said we enjoyed our friendship, I enjoyed drawing paintings playing basketball and we didn’t need lots of money to do those things. My teenage life there included good friends, some of them are here but most of them are still in Syria and that’s the only thing I enjoyed otherwise I live in a great country which is the United States of America.

I have many good memories of course from my teenage life, but I don’t regret leaving because I live in a big country which is United States of America which is the best place to live in. Even if there were advances in the life style in Syria or in Ashrafiyah we cannot compare it to the lifestyle of the lifestyle we are living in the United States so I rather stay here in United States then going back.

Interviewed by Gore Khachatrian