My Search for a Tablecloth in Damascus Shows the Ravages of Syria’s Eight-Year War

The request came on my last evening in Damascus. I was getting ready to go out to dinner when a friend, a journalist who used to also cover Syria, sent me a message asking to get him a tablecloth. He wanted a particular type, handcrafted with charming prints of flowers and birds, the kind available at the souvenir and handicraft stores in the old Hamidiyyeh bazaar. He didn’t want the intricate, silver-embroidered Aghabani style but rather the type stamped with block prints. “There’s something beautiful in their simplicity,” he told me. “Plus, when your friends invariably spill red wine on them, it’s not the end of the world. You can throw them in the washing machine.”

I figured it was an easy request. My dinner wasn’t far from the bazaar, on a nearby street called Straight—famously mentioned in the Bible—in this ancient, continuously inhabited city. All I’d need to take was a five-minute detour. I was wrong. I couldn’t find the tablecloths at the first store I walked into. Nor the second. Nor the third. I heard the same story in the five shops that were open that night in Hamidiyyeh: Only one man made them. He’s from Hama, in central Syria. No one knows what’s happened to him since the country started descending into chaos in 2011.