The best of carpets, the warmest of hospitality

Ataturk has had his revenge on Aleppo and the Syrians. Whole neighbourhoods of the city seem more Anatolian than Arab. They closely resemble Ankara, the capital Ataturk built for the Turkish state he founded when the Ottoman Empire collapsed.

The resemblance is particularly pronounced in the pollution-stained area around the Baron Hotel where angry citizens protesting against Turkish rule over Syria drove him from the simple comforts of room 201, where I spent a night recently. The comfortable beds and gleaming bathroom installed in the imposing Ottoman-style villa a brief seven years before his occupancy in October 1918 have become lumpy and leaky a long and eventful 82 years on. Nevertheless, the Baron retains a certain perverse attraction for history-minded tourists.

Syria has paid dearly for putting to flight the "Father of the Turkish Nation". In 1939, Ankara annexed the coastal sanjak [county] of Alexandretta, claimed by Syria. France, the mandatory power, ceded the area to Turkey.

The population of Arabs and Armenians fled, many settling in Aleppo, where they have prospered in the cosmopolitan trading centre which claims, competing with Damascus, to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world.

And, today, Syria complains it is not receiving its fair share of the waters of the Euphrates river because the Ataturk dam across the border impounds the flow of sources rising in southern Turkey. Five years of drought parched the rich farmland around Aleppo, exacerbating Syrian resentment.

Ataturk is not the only historic figure to lodge at the Baron, Syria's first modern hotel. T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), President Teddy Roosevelt, novelist Agatha Christie and royalty from many countries have, like Ataturk, climbed the stairs to the first floor and remarked on the poster advertising the Orient Express or taken a glass of beer in the sanctum of the bar after exploring the labyrinthine souqs which date from the Ottoman period.

Entering through the slim passage grandly called the Antioch Gate, we were overwhelmed by the strong scents of spices and olive-oil soap and syrupy sweets, and the pungent odour of fat from sheep carcasses hanging in butchers' stalls. A young man selling textiles proclaims "Happy Hour" bargains and serves us thick Turkish coffee while flicking open a vibrant display of silk scarves.

We are ambushed by a carpet merchant's scout, "Abu Rami", the "Father of Rami", a 27-year-old graduate in English literature from the city's university. To reach his hidden den we pass through a sweatshop were 12-year-olds are sewing baby clothes and underwear.

Within, tea and magnificent carpets are on the menu. Aleppo remains one of the best places to buy carpets in the region, for it stands astride the route to Damascus and Mecca. Pilgrims from Iran, Turkey and Afghanistan often pay for their spiritual journey with mundane carpets and kalims. Over coffee at a cafe on the main road, Abu Rami, looking up at the citadel which defended the city for thousands of years, relishes the lines from Shakespeare's Othello:

Where a malignant and turbaned Turk

Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,

I took by the throat the circumcised dog

And smote him thus.

The fortress rises like a massive golden cliff on the ancient acropolis where Abraham, the patriarch of Arab and Jew, is said to have milked his red cow on a journey from Ur of the Chaldees to the Howran. The citadel's high crenellated walls and ingenious defences were never breached by the Crusaders during their military occupation of the Levant. Only the Monguls under Tamerlane ("Timur Lank" - Timur the Lame) invaded and devastated this magnificent pile.

Today convoys of black-clad veiled women from the Gulf and uniformed schoolchildren march up the broad steps of the bridge across the moat at the foot of the hill. Two teenage girls in long coats and headscarves, the dress of conservative Muslim women, stop and ask in excellent English where we are from. When we reply, a girl in brown with a grand smile says: "Welcome to our country."

She was not the first to do so. Wherever we encountered Syrians, in shops and streets, climbing over ruins and strolling in parks, they stopped and greeted us warmly or offered to guide us when we seemed lost. Mass tourism has not yet penetrated here to destroy the age-old tradition of Arab hospitality. To be in Aleppo once or, in my case, twice, is to be in Aleppo always.