B2 · Upper Intermediate
13 min
culturehistorylanguageconflict and society
Older Than History Knows What to Do With
Damasco tiene cuatro mil años. El mundo acaba de recordarlo.
This week, the United States removed Syria from its state sponsors of terrorism list, and Assad's Grand Mufti was sentenced to life in prison for war crimes. Fletcher and Octavio go beyond the headlines to talk about what Syria means culturally: one of the oldest civilizations on earth, a language that shaped Spanish, and a country trying to remember who it was before the war.
Esta semana, Estados Unidos retiró a Siria de su lista de estados patrocinadores del terrorismo, y el Gran Mufti del régimen de Assad fue condenado a cadena perpetua por crímenes de guerra. Fletcher y Octavio van más allá de los titulares para hablar de lo que Siria representa culturalmente: una de las civilizaciones más antiguas del mundo, una lengua que dejó su huella en el español, y un país que ahora intenta recordar quién era antes de la guerra.
8 essential B2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| el patrimonio | heritage, patrimony | Palmira era parte del patrimonio cultural de toda la humanidad. |
| la diáspora | diaspora | La diáspora siria ha preservado muchas tradiciones culturales en el exilio. |
| devastado/a | devastated | El casco antiguo de Alepo quedó devastado tras años de guerra. |
| ininterrumpido/a | uninterrupted, continuous | Damasco tiene más de cuatro mil años de historia humana ininterrumpida. |
| ojalá | hopefully, I wish, God willing (triggers subjunctive) | Ojalá que los refugiados puedan volver pronto a su país. |
| la convivencia | coexistence, living together | Durante siglos hubo una convivencia profunda entre culturas en la península ibérica. |
| la fragilidad | fragility | Los escritores sirios muestran una consciencia especial de la fragilidad de la civilización. |
| restaurar | to restore | Hay muchos sitios arqueológicos sirios que necesitan ser restaurados. |
Two things happened with Syria this week that I keep turning over in my mind.
The United States formally removed Syria from its list of state sponsors of terrorism.
And separately, Assad's Grand Mufti, a man named Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to life in prison.
Son dos noticias que juntas dicen algo muy importante.
These are two pieces of news that together say something very important.
No es solo política.
It's not just politics.
Es el mundo reconociendo, aunque sea tarde, que Siria existía antes de Assad, y que tiene que existir después de él.
It's the world recognizing, even if belatedly, that Syria existed before Assad, and that it has to exist after him.
And that's exactly where I want to start, because I think the news cycle treats Syria as a conflict, as a crisis, as a refugee number.
But this feels like a moment to ask what Syria actually is, culturally.
What got damaged, what survived, and what comes next.
Mira, Damasco es posiblemente la ciudad habitada de forma continua más antigua del mundo.
Look, Damascus is possibly the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.
No una de las más antiguas.
Not one of the oldest.
Probablemente la más antigua.
Probably the oldest.
Estamos hablando de más de cuatro mil años de historia humana ininterrumpida en el mismo lugar.
We're talking about more than four thousand years of uninterrupted human history in the same place.
Four thousand years.
Rome was still countryside when Damascus had a city center.
Exactamente.
Exactly.
Y Alepo, al norte, tiene una historia similar.
And Aleppo, in the north, has a similar history.
El casco antiguo de Alepo era Patrimonio de la Humanidad de la UNESCO.
Aleppo's old city was a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
Era uno de los mercados cubiertos más grandes y antiguos del mundo, el Gran Bazar, que los sirios llaman el zoco.
It had one of the largest and oldest covered markets in the world, the Grand Bazaar, which Syrians call the souk.
Y quedó devastado.
And it was devastated.
I was in Beirut in 2013, just across the border, when the battle for Aleppo was at its worst.
You could follow it through the people coming through.
Families carrying almost nothing.
And some of them had this look, not just of fear, but of something more specific.
Like they were watching something irreplaceable burn.
Porque lo era.
Because it was.
Y luego está Palmira.
And then there's Palmyra.
Palmira es quizás el ejemplo más brutal de destrucción cultural deliberada.
Palmyra is perhaps the most brutal example of deliberate cultural destruction.
El Estado Islámico no destruyó Palmira por accidente.
The Islamic State didn't destroy Palmyra by accident.
Lo hizo porque sabía exactamente lo que estaba haciendo: borrar identidad.
It did so because it knew exactly what it was doing: erasing identity.
Palmyra.
God.
Those columns.
I've seen the photographs, the before and after, and it still doesn't feel real.
There was a Roman amphitheater there that ISIS used to stage executions.
A place where people had gathered to watch theater for two thousand years.
Y mataron al arqueólogo que había dedicado su vida a proteger ese sitio.
And they killed the archaeologist who had dedicated his life to protecting that site.
Khaled al-Asaad.
Khaled al-Asaad.
Tenía ochenta y dos años.
He was eighty-two years old.
Se negó a decirles dónde estaban escondidas las piezas más valiosas.
He refused to tell them where the most valuable pieces were hidden.
Y lo ejecutaron en la plaza principal de la ciudad que había amado toda su vida.
And they executed him in the main square of the city he had loved his whole life.
That detail, the hiding of the pieces first, it says something about what he understood was at stake.
He was buying time for objects that had survived two millennia.
And he paid for it.
Lo que me parece importante entender es que esto no fue solo destrucción física.
What I think is important to understand is that this was not just physical destruction.
Fue una estrategia.
It was a strategy.
Cuando destruyes los monumentos de una civilización, intentas convencer a la gente de que esa civilización nunca existió, o de que no merece existir.
When you destroy a civilization's monuments, you're trying to convince people that that civilization never existed, or that it doesn't deserve to exist.
And Assad did his own version of that, differently.
Because Assad's regime didn't just ignore Syrian cultural heritage, it weaponized it.
The Grand Mufti, Hassoun, he was essentially the regime's religious face.
He gave theological cover to the violence.
That conviction this week, what does it mean to Syrians culturally?
Es simbólico, pero los símbolos importan.
It's symbolic, but symbols matter.
El Islam es parte fundamental de la identidad siria, igual que el cristianismo, el judaísmo y otras tradiciones que han coexistido allí durante siglos.
Islam is a fundamental part of Syrian identity, just as Christianity, Judaism, and other traditions that have coexisted there for centuries are.
Que alguien que usó la autoridad religiosa para justificar crímenes sea condenado, eso es una forma de devolver esa autoridad a su lugar legítimo.
The fact that someone who used religious authority to justify crimes is convicted, that is a way of restoring that authority to its legitimate place.
Syria is one of those places where every major civilization passed through and left something behind.
Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Ottomans.
You can walk through Damascus and read the layers.
Y eso tiene consecuencias lingüísticas también.
And that has linguistic consequences too.
El árabe sirio, el árabe clásico que se desarrolló en esa región, se convirtió en una de las fuentes más importantes del español.
Syrian Arabic, the classical Arabic that developed in that region, became one of the most important sources of Spanish.
No muchos hispanohablantes lo saben, pero hay miles de palabras en español que vienen directamente del árabe.
Not many Spanish speakers know it, but there are thousands of words in Spanish that come directly from Arabic.
Okay, now you have my full attention.
I know there's the Moorish influence on Spanish through al-Andalus, but thousands of words?
Give me examples.
Azúcar.
Sugar.
Aceite.
Oil.
Almohada.
Pillow.
Alcalde.
Mayor.
Álgebra.
Algebra.
Algoritmo.
Algorithm.
Hasta la exclamación más española que existe: ojalá.
Even the most Spanish exclamation that exists: ojalá.
Eso viene directamente del árabe.
That comes directly from Arabic.
De la frase 'in sha'a Allah', que significa 'si Dios quiere'.
From the phrase 'in sha'a Allah', which means 'God willing'.
Ojalá es árabe.
Ojalá is Arabic.
I use 'ojalá' all the time and I had absolutely no idea.
That's the kind of thing that makes you look at a word completely differently.
It carries an entire civilization inside it.
Es que el contacto entre el mundo árabe y la península ibérica duró casi ochocientos años.
The contact between the Arab world and the Iberian Peninsula lasted almost eight hundred years.
No fue solo una influencia superficial.
It wasn't just a superficial influence.
Fue una convivencia profunda.
It was a deep coexistence.
Los árabes traían ciencia, matemáticas, medicina, filosofía.
The Arabs brought science, mathematics, medicine, philosophy.
Y todo eso entró en el español a través del vocabulario.
And all of that entered Spanish through vocabulary.
And the architecture.
The Alhambra in Granada.
I went there once, years ago, and I remember standing in one of the courtyards and thinking this doesn't look European.
It's something else entirely.
Porque no es europeo.
Because it isn't European.
La Alhambra es un palacio árabe construido en suelo español.
The Alhambra is an Arab palace built on Spanish soil.
Los nazaríes que lo construyeron venían de una tradición que conecta directamente con Siria, con el Levante, con toda esa región.
The Nasrids who built it came from a tradition that connects directly with Syria, with the Levant, with that entire region.
Cuando caminas por la Alhambra, caminas por una extensión de esa civilización.
When you walk through the Alhambra, you're walking through an extension of that civilization.
So when Palmyra gets blown up, or when the souk in Aleppo burns, Spain has skin in the game too, in a sense.
This isn't distant history.
It's part of what made Spanish what it is.
Eso es exactamente lo que pienso, aunque muchos españoles no lo ven así.
That's exactly what I think, although many Spaniards don't see it that way.
Hay una tendencia a ver Al-Ándalus como algo ajeno, algo que fue eliminado en la Reconquista y ya no tiene nada que ver con nosotros.
There's a tendency to see al-Andalus as something foreign, something that was eliminated in the Reconquista and has nothing to do with us anymore.
Pero eso es una mentira cómoda.
But that's a comfortable lie.
Está en nuestra lengua, en nuestra cocina, en nuestra arquitectura.
It's in our language, our cooking, our architecture.
And the food.
Fletcher's favorite subject.
What did the Arab world give Spanish cuisine?
El arroz, para empezar.
Rice, to start.
Y con el arroz, la paella.
And with rice, paella.
Así que la próxima vez que Fletcher insista en poner chorizo en la paella, que sepa que está mezclando dos influencias distintas: la árabe y la castellana.
So the next time Fletcher insists on putting chorizo in the paella, he should know he's mixing two distinct influences: the Arab one and the Castilian one.
Aunque eso no lo hace menos equivocado.
Although that doesn't make him any less wrong.
I walked right into that one.
Fine.
But stay on Syria, because I want to get to what this week's news actually means for Syrian culture going forward.
There are now something like six million Syrian refugees outside the country.
What happens to a culture when that much of its population is scattered across three continents?
Pasan dos cosas a la vez.
Two things happen simultaneously.
Por un lado, la cultura se fragmenta.
On one hand, the culture fragments.
Las tradiciones se interrumpen, los idiomas se mezclan, los hijos crecen sin los referentes de sus padres.
Traditions are interrupted, languages mix, children grow up without their parents' cultural references.
Por otro lado, la diáspora también preserva cosas.
On the other hand, the diaspora also preserves things.
Los sirios en Berlín, en Estocolmo, en Buenos Aires, han mantenido viva su música, su literatura, su cocina.
Syrians in Berlin, in Stockholm, in Buenos Aires, have kept their music, literature, and cooking alive.
There's a Syrian novelist, Khaled Khalifa, who stayed in Damascus all through the war and kept writing.
I read an interview with him years ago where he said something like, leaving would have been a kind of death for him, because the city was his material.
And he died in Damascus in 2023, right in the middle of it all.
Conozco su obra.
I know his work.
'No cuchillos en las cocinas de esta ciudad'.
'No Knives in the Kitchens of This City'.
Es una novela sobre Alepo, sobre la memoria de una ciudad que ya sabía que iba a desaparecer.
It's a novel about Aleppo, about the memory of a city that already knew it was going to disappear.
Hay algo en los escritores sirios, una consciencia del tiempo, de la fragilidad, que viene precisamente de vivir en un lugar con cuatro mil años de historia.
There's something in Syrian writers, an awareness of time, of fragility, that comes precisely from living in a place with four thousand years of history.
And that's the cultural weight of this week's news, for me at least.
Removing Syria from the terrorism list, convicting the Grand Mufti, these are legal and political acts.
But what they open the door to is the possibility of Syria rejoining the world as a culture, not just as a conflict zone.
Eso es lo más importante.
That's the most important thing.
Siria necesita inversión, necesita reconstrucción, pero también necesita que el mundo deje de verla solo como un problema.
Syria needs investment, needs reconstruction, but it also needs the world to stop seeing it only as a problem.
Tiene museos que reabrir, sitios arqueológicos que restaurar, escritores que publicar, músicos que actuar.
It has museums to reopen, archaeological sites to restore, writers to publish, musicians to perform.
Tiene cultura que compartir.
It has culture to share.
Though I'd push back slightly on the optimism, just because I've seen how slowly these processes actually move.
The international community has a long history of symbolic gestures that don't translate into actual support.
Removing Syria from a list is easy.
Funding the restoration of Palmyra is hard.
No te lo discuto.
I won't argue with you on that.
Pero también es verdad que sin el primer paso, el segundo no llega nunca.
But it's also true that without the first step, the second never arrives.
Y que los sirios llevan años esperando que alguien, cualquiera, señale hacia adelante en lugar de describir el desastre.
And Syrians have spent years waiting for someone, anyone, to point forward instead of describing the disaster.
Esta semana, al menos, hay dos señales en esa dirección.
This week, at least, there are two signals in that direction.
Fair.
I'll take two signals.
Now, you used 'ojalá' about twenty minutes ago, naturally, and I let it pass at the time.
But you just reminded me that ojalá comes from Arabic.
And I want to ask you about that, because it functions in Spanish in a way that doesn't have a clean English equivalent.
Claro.
Of course.
Ojalá es especial porque expresa un deseo con una carga de incertidumbre, a veces incluso de duda.
Ojalá is special because it expresses a wish with a weight of uncertainty, sometimes even doubt.
'Ojalá vuelvan los refugiados' no es simplemente 'espero que vuelvan'.
'Ojalá vuelvan los refugiados' is not simply 'I hope the refugees return'.
Hay algo más ahí.
There's something more there.
Una mezcla de esperanza y de consciencia de que quizás no ocurra.
A mixture of hope and awareness that perhaps it won't happen.
And grammatically it triggers the subjunctive, right?
That's why you said 'vuelvan' and not 'vuelven'.
Exacto.
Exactly.
Ojalá casi siempre va con subjuntivo porque expresa algo que todavía no es real, que es deseo o posibilidad.
Ojalá almost always goes with the subjunctive because it expresses something that is not yet real, that is wish or possibility.
'Ojalá llueva mañana.' 'Ojalá tengamos paz.' No sabemos si ocurrirá.
'Ojalá llueva mañana.' 'Ojalá tengamos paz.' We don't know if it will happen.
El subjuntivo refleja esa incertidumbre.
The subjunctive reflects that uncertainty.
Es una de las cosas que hacen el español más rico, esa capacidad de marcar gramaticalmente si algo es real o solo deseado.
It's one of the things that makes Spanish richer, that ability to grammatically mark whether something is real or only wished for.
English just says 'hopefully' and then leaves you to figure out whether the speaker actually believes it.
The subjunctive does something more honest, in a way.
It flags the uncertainty upfront.
Y lo mejor es que ojalá guarda en su interior ocho siglos de historia.
And the best thing is that ojalá carries eight centuries of history inside it.
Cada vez que un hispanohablante dice ojalá, sin saberlo, está usando una palabra que viajó desde el árabe clásico, cruzó el Mediterráneo, y se quedó para siempre en el español.
Every time a Spanish speaker says ojalá, without knowing it, they're using a word that traveled from classical Arabic, crossed the Mediterranean, and stayed in Spanish forever.
Eso es cultura.
That is culture.
Eso es lo que no se puede destruir del todo.
That is what cannot be entirely destroyed.
I'm going to think about that every single time I say it from now on.
Ojalá, coming from 'in sha'a Allah', landing in Spanish through eight centuries of contact, and now sitting in a language learning podcast about Syria.
That's a long journey for a word.
Ojalá que Siria también llegue a buen puerto después de tan largo camino.
Ojalá Syria also reaches safe harbor after such a long journey.
Now you're using it against me.
That was well done, I'll admit.
Ojalá.