Sleeping with Agatha Christie and the ghosts of guests past in Syria’s Baron Hotel
Do you believe in ghosts? I wish I did, for were I to entertain the flimsiest hope that some relic of a personality could haunt a place where once they were, then I should not have slept a wink last night, for the thrill of who might linger. But I slept soundly in Agatha Christie’s bedroom. T.E. Lawrence slept next door.
Where am I?
Well, if I tell you that any visiting Madame Arcati would expect to contact — besides those two — Field Marshall Lord Slim, Lord Hore-Belisha, H.V. Morton, María Teresa de Borbón and Princess Eugénie of Greece, do you begin to guess? Did I mention Peter, Prince of Greece, or Dr Schacht, the Nazis’ banker? Can there be anywhere in the world where more spectacular names can be found together in the same guest book?
I am in the Baron Hotel, in Aleppo, northern Syria. And when I ask whether there be any other point on the planet where, in space though not in time, so many famous lives have intersected, my question is not rhetorical. Maybe the Savoy in London? New York’s Waldorf Astoria? The British embassy in Paris? The Baron Hotel is in this league. For much of the 20th century there was nowhere else grand in this city for grandees, royals, statesmen and celebrities to stay. Everyone who was anyone, and passing through Aleppo, has laid their heads here.
And I do mean everyone. I’ve been leafing through the guest book and taking a note, while hotel staff (unnerved at my methodical transcription) hover in hopes of returning it to safekeeping. Many of them have worked here for decades, like Mr Walid, who hovers like a friendly spirit, ever anxious to assist, like a character from an Olivia Manning novel.
Lawrence of Arabia’s hotel and bar-bill (room 202: his name misspelled by the clerk as Laurence) are framed on the wall of a no-nonsense bar that doesn’t appear to have changed since the second world war. The Baron is proud of its history. From Julie Christie (no ghost, she) in 1997 to David Rockefeller 20 years earlier, right back to a Mr and Mrs Roosevelt, ‘Occupation: ex-Governor of Philippines’ in 1933 (Teddy’s son, on his way to foment that ill-conceived coup in Iran), this was the place to come. The Prince of Saxony called by in 1930.
Julie Christie was a late straggler, for while the hotel’s illustrious place in modern history stays strong, its pre-eminence among local hotels, in what has become a big business centre of modern Syria, has dimmed. Nostalgia and a sense of the past sustain a place that cannot compete, and does not try, with the bling and swimming pools of a 21st-century conference hotel.
But let me describe the Baron Hotel we saw as our taxi from Damascus drove in yesterday from the twilight. It had been a long, amazing day. We had diverted from the desert highway to visit two mysterious, dead, grey marble Byzantine cities, ghostly in the warm, slanting evening light. We had left our route to walk, astonished, along the marble-colonnaded two-kilometre high street of an unbelievable 2nd-century Roman town (Apamea). And I had seen surely the best castle I ever shall: the Crusaders’ 12th-century Krac des Chevaliers. Aleppo at nightfall felt like a return to our own epoch. Until, that is, we pulled up beside an imposing but sombre mansion.
Surrounded by glassier, ritzier, more illuminated buildings, the Baron looked like a dark mirage from 1911. Three storeys high in yellowing marble, it was completed in that year for three Armenian brothers confident that the arrival of the Berlin to Baghdad railway would put Aleppo on the international map. Its balconies, tall French shutters, Moorish high arched windows and great wood-panelled dining-room were soon to see King Faisal I of Syria declare independence from its terrace in 1919. Faisal I of Iraq stayed here. Who ‘Princess Stirby’ was, in 1934, I cannot say; but a year later Amy Johnson puts ‘Aviator’ for Occupation, and her address as ‘England–Australia air-race’. (Yuri Gagarin, Astronaut, gave no space-address when he stayed.)
In the same year, 1934, Agatha Christie on a second visit calls herself Christie Mallowan — her archaeologist husband’s name. At the desk in room 203, where I am typing now, she is said to have begun writing Murder on the Orient Express. Whether she bumped into Prince Bertil of Sweden, with two Crown Princesses in tow, we cannot say; nor whether in 1940 the Earl of Macduff met the French Governor-General of Syria or our ambassador in Turkey, Sir Hugh Knatchbull-Hugessen. But from time to time the British Governor General of Palestine popped in, I know not why.
Nor do I know who ‘The Lady Mary Walker’ was, though to the name ‘W.J. Slim’ its bearer has modestly added ‘(Gen)’, and we know who ‘J. Auchinleck’ was — these last-named visiting in 1941 at the same time as a French general and a Brazilian minister whose names I cannot decipher. Please forgive any spelling mistakes here: not everybody’s handwriting was copperplate even in days gone by, though Lady Cornwallis in 1944 and Princess Eugénie of Greece in 1947 are as clear as are the Duchesses of Westminster and Northampton in that year; and Judith, Countess of Listowel, two decades later. I suppose princesses, duchesses and countesses have appearances to keep up.
A handful, however, of the most seriously top people don’t write in the book, though the Baron Hotel’s management have their names. Kemal Atatürk didn’t, and you would not expect the late President Hafez Assad of Syria to have done so. I couldn’t find Queen Ingrid of Denmark (Greek royalty, I suppose, ever-anxious to write their names in the book, were getting a bit desperate by then); but Charles Lindberg is there, as is Lady Louise Mountbatten, and the Princess Galizine.
I would be very surprised if this was the first Spectator report of this place — heavens, Patrick Leigh Fermor and Eric Newby have passed through. But in 2009 it’s worth reporting that though it has seen grander days, the Baron Hotel is by no means decrepit. The dark furniture in the implausibly high-ceilinged rooms are unchanged; the plumbing’s fine, the staff helpful, the tariff reasonable — and the air-conditioning works.
Tomorrow we set out by overnight train to Istanbul. Today I’ve explored Aleppo — a rich and historic city with careful regard for its past, its wonderful stone-arcaded souks and its awesome citadel, where tourists are understood and cared for but never amount to more than a sprinkling. This evening I shall sip arak on the terrace from which King Faisal addressed the cheering crowds; and tonight I shall think of Murder on the Orient Express as I sink into my Edwardian single bed, and hope it really was once Agatha Christie’s.
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