The declaration of a love, so guileless that it was somehow all the more surprising, had been handwritten inside the cover of Palmyra 1885.
“This book is one of my favorites and I enjoy it every time I look through it, because I love Palmyra,” the owner of the book had inked by the title page, as if wanting his reflection to remain as testimony.
I looked through the pages in Damascus in April, where the man who wrote of his love for Palmyra had lent me the book. Inside, the photographs of the archaeologist John Henry Haynes showed the wonders of the city as it had been 140 years ago, before the latest ravages of war and ideology and looting had taken their toll.
Then the owner of the book and I started the drive northeastwards, to see Palmyra for ourselves. It was to be his fifth trip to the desert ruins in two decades. Along the way, he said this time would be the last, and told me that he would never see Palmyra again. He was 89 years old by then, creased and battered by long hard roads that stretched from Finsbury Park, where he grew up, through a score of wars and many ruins, to that place of tumbled stone and drifting sand.
Death was on his mind, but passion still tinged his words.
Later, looking out across the desert from the heights of the 13th-century Mamluk fortress to the plain below, where the Cardo Maximus road stretched away into the heat haze, past the Roman theater, through Hadrian’s Gate and on to the ruins of the Temple of Bel in the distance, he told me of the moment that he had first seen the city 19 years before.
“It felt as if the breath in my lungs was being sucked out with the excitement. I was overwhelmed,” he said, staring out across the ruins. “I defy anybody not to be overwhelmed. It is so beautiful.”
Just for a moment I thought I saw his eyes shine and he turned away. I had seen him on the verge of tears only once before, 13 years earlier in Syria, on a cold December night in Aleppo. The moment had caught me by surprise then, and it surprised me now.
When he spoke again, it seemed as if the man was addressing his words not to me, but to the ancient ruins, to the place where the exhortations of a rebel queen still whispered on the warm breeze among the colonnades, and the ghostly tramp of marching legions approached in retribution.
“Standing here, looking down at this great Roman city, I’m astonished at my journey here, which began as a child in north London,” he said. “How did I get here? How was I this privileged? How did I get here to see this?”
He paused for a minute and then gathered himself. In the shimmer of the morning haze, it seemed that it was more than just Palmyra to whom Sir Don McCullin addressed his long goodbye.
“I won’t return,” he said. “I’m too old. I’m tired now as a man. I have overachieved my ambitions and it’s time to stop. My body is begging for release from, you know, my ambitious life that makes me climb up hills.”
McCullin confesses easily to passion. There have been many places in his life that hold no joy in his recall, but Palmyra infuses him with infectious delight, and there is no doubting his love for the desert city. More than this, the ancient ruins seemed to give him something greater too, and in the spring days we spent together there a joyful peace refreshed his troubled heart. As he slept on a hard and unforgiving bed beside me in a local apartment in Tadmor (as Palmyra is known in Arabic), even his dreams bounced with laughter and the murmurs of mysterious wonder.
“I have always felt passionate about this place,” he told me one afternoon as we passed through Palmyra’s Valley of the Tombs. “That passion remains. I find it almost a spiritual experience to be here.”
No wonder then that Britain’s most venerated photographer, a man of many scars and joys, had wished to return to the ancient city, to photograph it once more—and to say farewell.
Palmyra is no easy love. There is nothing benign among those tumbled columns and blasted temples. War is recent, and its magnetism has drawn in fighters from far afield. In underground Palmyrene tombs 1,800 years old, the graffiti of Islamic State fighters promises, “Hellfire upon the unbelievers”; exhortations in Dari, left by members of the ousted regime’s Afghan Shia Fatemiyoun Brigade, reflect on the wonders of martyrdom; and scraps of Russian newspapers left by Putin’s soldiers lay scattered in the sand at the castle gates.
Nor is peace a certainty in Syria. In the weeks leading up to McCullin’s return, more than a thousand Syrians, mainly Alawites and Druze, had been slain in sectarian killings. Israeli airstrikes were a regular occurrence. A riot against Druze students had occurred in Homs University, and there were reports of Islamic State checkpoints appearing on isolated desert roads north of Palmyra.
Indeed, six months after President Assad’s downfall and despite the lifting of sanctions and rapprochement with the US, it is unclear whether Syria’s revolution is truly complete, or whether Ahmed al-Sharaa, the former al-Qaeda member who is now Syria’s president, can stabilize the country in a way that preserves the rights of minorities in its mosaic of faiths.
Amid this turgid limbo, and with the future so uncertain, a struggle over Syria’s past has already begun. Aware of the dangers to its heritage posed by war damage and looting, the new government signed an agreement with the Syrian Civil Defence—better known as the White Helmets—in May to survey more than 10,000 historical sites over the next two years, as the start point of a new strategy to protect the country’s cultural legacy.
Yet it is not merely the physical vulnerability of Syria’s archaeological sites that expose them to threat. The narrative of the past is under attack too.
The great achievements of Islam’s 7th and 8th century Umayyad era in Syria, which left a legacy of art, architecture, mathematics and astronomy across the region, are being rebranded and reduced on Syrian social media sites as a catch-all dog whistle to Sunni dominance. In recent weeks, photographs of beaten Druze and Alawite detainees have appeared online beside #Umayyad, as if in triumph.
In January, authorities in Damascus announced that they were considering erasing Palmyra’s best known historical figure, Queen Zenobia—worshipper of Bel and Yarhibol, who famously rebelled against Rome, claimed kinship with Cleopatra and declared herself Queen of the East—from the education syllabus, as part of a more Islamist interpretation of Syrian history.
The sands of Palmyra have soaked up the blood of thousands across the march of history. Now, while the threat of further violence still lurks close by, the ruins beloved by McCullin lie at the fringe of a cultural battlefield.
There are two Don McCullins. There is the real McCullin. Then there is the more saintly version of the man, who plays to the public’s expectation of what Don McCullin should be. The first is complicated, impassioned, warm, gracious and extremely amusing. The other is some of the former, masked by a projection of what he thinks is expected of a man best known for his searing portrayals of suffering. The space between these two can be vexing.
Driving down the long road from Damascus to Homs and then across the desert to Palmyra, I was in the company of the former.
He is a great storyteller and tales of distant wars, of fading seducers, of actresses, mercenaries, of high adventures and grief and loss and laughter, formed milestones to the desert ride. His greatest friends, who include the American journalist Charlie Glass and the Queen’s late brother, the adventurer and writer Mark Shand, he refers to with the affectionate prefix “my friend”.
Somewhere outside Homs, McCullin described how his brother Michael left home after a fight with a rival over a girl, and joined the Foreign Legion.
West of Palmyra, between an abandoned tank and the T-4 military base at Tiyas, McCullin’s face suddenly clouded as he recounted the death of British journalist Nicholas Tomalin, lying dead by his flaming vehicle, blasted by a Syrian rocket in the Yom Kippur war of 1973.
Somewhere on that desert road too appeared a woman unhinged by a car bomb in Beirut, who pummeled McCullin in fury—only after he took her picture, of course—before herself dying in another car-bomb blast.
Sometimes he talked of the Guvnors, the Finsbury Park street gang who, photographed by McCullin in 1958 posing in the ruins of a London bomb site, became the subject of the first photograph he had published, the image which launched his career into its incredible ascent.
In ruins it began, in ruins it may end.
Despite being best known for his work in war zones during his epic 1966-1984 career with The Sunday Times, McCullin loathes the description “war photographer”, regarding it as limiting and unimaginative. Indeed, the breadth of his portfolio of work is huge, encompassing multiple genres. He has sold more prints of landscapes than of wars.
His passion for archaeological photography began after his split with The Sunday Times when, in search of new direction and keen to reorientate himself away from conflict, McCullin embarked upon a project for his book Southern Frontiers, photographing the distant borders of the Roman Empire in north Africa and the Middle East. He crossed into Syria in 2006, and traveled to the ruins at Palmyra for the first time.
English adventurers from an earlier era had already been deeply moved by its wonders.
“Nothing in this scorching, desolate land could be so refreshing,” T.E. Lawrence wrote of the ruined city. Lawrence of Arabia’s friend and sometime traveling companion, the adventuress and diplomat Gertrude Bell, was no less effusive. “I wonder if the wide world presents a more singular landscape,” she wrote of the ransacked city in 1900, describing its “mass of columns, ranged into long avenues, grouped into temples, lying broken on the sand or pointing one long solitary finger to Heaven”.
Agatha Christie was similarly captivated. “It is lovely and fantastic and unbelievable, with all the theatrical implausibility of a dream,” the author observed after visiting Palmyra in the Thirties. “It isn’t—it can’t be—real.”
McCullin sees the city differently. Though allured by the desolate beauty of Palmyra, he says that he also feels drawn to the ruins by the tension still reverberating there, the defiance of the last stones standing, the echoes of the city’s violent past.
“Two thousand years of history are standing defiantly here,” he said. “There’s defiance and there’s beauty, but I feel guilty about being in love with it. There’s a kind of rhythmic vibration here, of history, but also of suffering.”
Though Palmyra’s true origins remain shrouded in the depths of ancient time, myths of its early existence abound, and the Hebrew scriptures describe the oasis city as being founded by King Solomon.
What is known for certain is that a settlement established there more than 2,000 years before the birth of Jesus Christ had, by the 1st century AD, become a thriving city, a major trade point in the Roman Empire for caravans moving east and west along the Silk Road. Though colonized by the Romans, Palmyra maintained its own semi-autonomous monarchy, and the wealth of Palmyrene merchants allowed for the creation of the city’s most ambitious structures, including the Great Colonnade, the theatre and the Temple of Bel.
This temple, completed in AD32 and consecrated to the Mesopotamian god Bel, became the centre of the city’s religious life. It was in the Temple of Bel too, during his first visit to the city, that McCullin was painfully injured, falling among the stones, breaking a rib and collapsing his lung. Unaware of the full extent of the damage until later, he worked on in agony.
A couple of days after his fall, hunched and in pain, McCullin walked into the nearby museum. Here he met Dr Khaled al-Asaad, the Syrian archaeologist who had dedicated his life to revealing the truths of Palmyra’s hidden past.
“I crawled into the museum in great agony and asked to see the director. I was immediately invited to Asaad’s office and I sat uncomfortably on the edge of his sofa because I was in such pain,” McCullin recalled. “I made several requests for assistance with my work. Each time I made a request, he smiled and replied, ‘Why not?’ He helped me with everything I needed and showed me great kindness.”
Asaad remains a legendary figure in Syria. His work for the country’s Directorate-General of Antiquities and Museums over four decades raised Palmyra’s profile from relative obscurity to international fame. More than any other individual, his endeavours resulted in Palmyra becoming listed as a Unesco world heritage site in 1980.
Yet the man so committed to his studies of Palmyra that he learnt the Palmyrene dialect of Aramaic, spoken in the city during the zenith of its power 2,000 years ago, died at the hands of savages.
One of the archaeologist’s sons, Mohammed al-Asaad, now 54, showed me the last known photograph of his father. It was taken on August 18, 2015.
Nine years after he met Don McCullin, Asaad, aged 83, was hung upside down and in chains from a traffic light in a Tadmor street, not far from his own home. His severed head lay on the tarmac beneath him. As a final act of mockery, the archaeologist’s glasses had been placed over his eyes.
Islamic State twice emerged from the desert to seize Palmyra, and their murder of Asaad and deliberate destruction of many of the city’s most important sites and temples, including the Temple of Bel and the Arch of Triumph, caused outrage.
The militant group first captured the city in May 2015, sweeping into Palmyra from Raqqa, their self-styled capital, some 130 miles to the north. In the final desperate days of fighting before Isis defeated regime troops, a last-ditch attempt was made to evacuate as many artefacts as possible from the museum at Tadmor. Museum staff and a handful of Syrian police officers loaded trucks borrowed from the Ministry of Agriculture with statues, coins, beads and ceramics, as fighting raged at the end of the main street.
Dr Khalil al-Hariri, an archaeologist who was by then director of the museum and Asaad’s son-in-law, was among the last group of men loading statues onto a flatbed truck when a burst of fire from an Islamic State gunman wounded him and three others in the museum’s front yard. They were thrown aboard the last truck out, their blood dripping onto the statues beneath them.
“We were chucked on top of the statues as the lorry raced away to Homs,” he described. “It was chaos. Bullets were striking the walls of the museum and the ground around us. Islamic State was at the end of the road.”
A month after their capture of Palmyra, Islamic State began to destroy the city’s Roman colonnades. Next, an Isis propaganda film showed the execution on the Roman theatre stage of 25 captured soldiers by teenage militants, who shot the captives simultaneously in the back of the head. Two months later, in August 2015, Islamic State released the first pictures, verified by satellite imagery, charting their destruction of the Temple of Bel with vast quantities of dynamite, justifying the demolition as the removal of a heretical place of worship.
The same month, they murdered Asaad in front of a crowd, hanging a charge sheet on his body that accused him of “celebrating the worship of idols”.
The murdered man’s family told me of a macabre twist that followed the archaeologist’s killing. Knowing that after four days on public display, Isis would throw his body to the desert, a cousin of the Asaad family crept up to his hanging corpse on the second night, collected the archaeologist’s head and buried it secretly. Yet that man was then killed after stepping on a mine without ever managing to tell Asaad’s family where the head was buried. Neither the archaeologist’s head nor body have been recovered.
Islamic State was driven out of Palmyra by regime forces and Russian troops in March 2016. The Russians celebrated their victory with a concert in the Roman theater, where Valery Gergiev conducted the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra and President Vladimir Putin appeared on screen in a video link to congratulate his troops. But by December that year Islamic State had recaptured the city once again, and destroyed more monuments before being driven out for good in March 2017.
As one of the last photographers to see Palmyra before its assault by Islamic State, McCullin is soulful when reflecting on the earlier images he captured of the city, and his own relationship with the ruins of civilization.
“Thank God I had got there in time to record those beautiful places and make the most amazing prints,” he said. “In a way, I’ve got the last record of those extraordinary places that Isis destroyed. Looking back over my life now, though I spent 60 years going to war, I wish I had indulged my whole life in the photography of the archaeological world.”
The damage wrought upon Palmyra by Islamic State captured world attention. Yet between periods of affluence and stability, the city’s ancient past had also involved spasms of blood and ruination, thousands of years before Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s Isis extremists swept into town, blew up the Temple of Bel and murdered the city’s best known archaeologist.
In the decades before he was beheaded and hung from a traffic light, much of Asaad’s work had focused on Queen Zenobia, Palmyra’s most famous figure—a warrior monarch akin to Boudica in Syria’s popular consciousness—who was at the center of the city’s most apocalyptic era, yet who may now be removed from the Syrian education syllabus. Such was his obsession with the rebel queen that the archaeologist named his first daughter Zenobia.
Born in AD240, and claiming descent from Cleopatra, Queen Zenobia was a Hellenised Arab, described by chroniclers as being a woman of great beauty and intelligence. She took the Palmyrene throne after the assassination of her husband, Odaenathus, in AD267 and later embarked on war against Rome, capturing all of Syria, Anatolia and Egypt.
The Romans struck back in AD272, when Emperor Aurelian marched against the rebel queen and twice routed her armies. Queen Zenobia’s true fate is unknown. Some accounts describe her as being captured by Aurelian alive, and allowed to live in exile in a villa outside Rome, where she married a Roman senator and lived in comfort. Others describe her death in battle.
Whatever happened to Queen Zenobia, after a third Palmyrene rebellion against Rome, Aurelian returned and laid waste to the city, sacking the temples, slaughtering the inhabitants and leaving much of the city in ruin. Palmyra never recovered and despite fitful attempts at reconstruction — and further damage by Christian zealots in the 4th century — the city sank into semi-abandonment over the centuries that followed, until it eventually became deserted.
The history of killing and cruelty has left a strange, ethereal atmosphere amid the beauty and expanse of the ruins. McCullin feels it whenever working here.
“There’s something spooky about this place,” he said. “We come here; we only look upon its glory. But frankly speaking, sometimes the hair on the back of my neck stands up. There is definitely a presence here. There’s an energy here, an energy of history, an energy of cruelty. All kinds of energies are still trapped here, 2,000 years later.”
We first met 22 years ago. It was a bad beginning. McCullin had arrived at a run-down house in Chamchamal in northern Iraq one night, near the Kurdish front line with Iraq, at the start of the US invasion in 2003, in the company of his friend Charlie Glass. I was sharing the house with four other freelance reporters and our local staff. Space was tight and we slept on the floors. Charlie Glass had glided in through the front door like a quinquereme, acting in an entitled manner as he asked for rooms for the night, McCullin looking a little embarrassed behind him. Piqued by Glass’s perceived lack of respect, we sent them back into the darkness. Fortunately, McCullin and I had other chances to share dismal lodgings.
In 2012 McCullin, by then 77 years old and with a medical history that included a stroke and a bypass, as well as a shrapnel wound in his groin from an ambush in Cambodia, had asked me to take him into Aleppo to see some action for the last time.
I agreed, but the question as to why he should want to go back to an active war zone nine years after he was last near violence irked me.
At times he said he wanted to revisit war to show solidarity with the risk of one of his sons, who was serving as a Royal Marine in Afghanistan at the time. A couple of times he said he was merely curious. Once he said he had just become bored.
As we drove into the outskirts of Aleppo and its tumbled grey ruins, and the sound of artillery began to rumble through the windows, he seemed happy. He made a couple of remarks about being troubled by the terrible nature of war, but he didn’t look it. The adrenaline had picked him up and turned him on. It was like chucking coal in the furnace.
In this respect, he was not much different from most of us involved in reporting wars. Men and women who cover conflict feel under an obligation to emphasize how terrible war is, and how heavy the price they pay for covering it, because the alternative—of admitting to the bounties of professional and personal success in charting the excoriating depths of other people’s pain—can be too difficult to front.
I gave McCullin the full Aleppo experience. He was shot at, encountered aggressive foreign fighters from the Jabhat al-Nusra militia, and lived with me in a cold, empty apartment building where the rain dribbled through shell holes in the roof and our shit piled up in a perfect pyramid in the pan of the waterless loo.
Artillery landed around the building each morning. We moved through underground tunnels and met rebel insurgents who were dead a fortnight later fighting in the subterranean gloom. I introduced him to a rebel commander who two years later shot me in an aborted kidnap attempt. We talked to the dispossessed; we saw the dead.
Throughout this time McCullin, already so old as to have a Blitz-era boyhood and famous for covering wars that already seemed vintage—Vietnam, Biafra, the Congo, Cyprus and the Lebanese civil war among them—complained only once, when he twisted his knee after I grabbed him under sniper fire and propelled him down the street into cover.
He is a very proud man and, looking back, it was the indignity and possible disrespect in the way I pushed him that would have upset him, rather than the injury. Honestly, I think he’d have preferred to be shot than pushed.
I had felt privileged that December to work alongside this man, whose photographs had been burnt into my consciousness from my earliest memories of reportage. The shellshocked Marine in Hue, 1968; the grief-stricken Cypriot widow, 1964; the phalangist mandolin player standing over the dead Palestinian girl in Beirut, 1976—I have only to close my eyes and I see them again.
Yet he also annoyed me on that trip. I resented his need to go back to war at 77. I felt he had gone perhaps a little more bad crazy than good crazy. One day on the front, as regime jets flew overhead and buildings lay smashed around us, a group of young Syrian rebels had hurled a hand grenade over a wall, then scattered away laughing as regime soldiers on the other side fired back in retaliation.
McCullin had laughed at the rebels’ delight as automatic fire crackled around us.
“They are happy now,” he said. His helmet was askew and he was puffing hard under the weight of his body armor. “So am I. I love this. I feel at home.”
The remark grated. It sounded sad, probably because it was as relevant to him as to any of us who have learnt that they are sometimes happiest in terrible places. You won’t find men and women with happy childhoods stepping through other people’s nightmares.
However, I learnt too that McCullin was more contradictory and complicated in his relationship with war than that incident may have suggested, when a few days later a barrage of shellfire caught some civilians in the open. The slain and badly injured were rolled aboard flatbed pick-ups. Three were dead: in tatters, hanging guts. McCullin fired off a few frames. He must have seen it a thousand times before. I never stopped to ask how he felt.
Yet that December night, as we sat together in the cold, McCullin told me he felt sick with shame. He began to choke back tears.
“I’d never felt like that in the past when I’d seen bodies,” he said. “I felt ashamed to be there doing what I was doing. What has this got to do with photography? Why have I come here?”
It seemed a moment of epiphany.
One other incident happened after that assignment, which left me with a lasting impression of the photographer. A couple of weeks after returning to the U.K. the article I had written about him appeared in The Times. Unwilling to collude with the bullshit about heroics and morality that society prefers in its stories of war, I had written an uncompromising, sometimes harsh account of McCullin’s presence in Aleppo. The morning the story was published in The Times he called me.
“That was a hard piece to read,” he said to me. “But it was fair.”
We became proper friends after that, and across the years shared much laughter and a few adventures. Ever full of surprises, while sea fishing together one day off Dartmouth, he had caught a large blue shark. He always beat me fishing. My stepdaughter photographed his hands. He handprinted a picture for my wife. Occasionally, we collaborated together. In 2018, after nine obsessive months trying to locate the shell-shocked Marine he had photographed in Hue during the Tet offensive in Vietnam in February 1968, I went to the US to find other members of the Marine Corps unit that McCullin had photographed during that key battle.
That’s how I met Melvyn “Frenchie” Bourgeois, whom McCullin had carried down wounded from the citadel wall; and Selwyn “S-Man” Taitt, likely “the Athlete” McCullin had photographed hurling a grenade at the North Vietnamese army. They all remembered the Englishman who appeared among them mid-battle, his physical courage, his exquisite manners and kindness.
Mostly, though, when we meet McCullin and I talk about fish and jackdaws and the Somerset Levels and rivers and the sea. Occasionally—because it has never stopped amusing me—I get him to tell me about the time, in his sixties in his garden in Somerset, when he fought six policemen who had to subdue him with pepper spray and handcuffs. (He slipped the handcuffs in the cop car on the way to the station and told the irritated officers that they were “f***ing useless”.)
I am often left thoughtful after seeing him, musing his depth and evasion of any easy description. Tough, yet at the same time very sensitive, sometimes vain but truly humble, McCullin is a swarm of contradictions. So much is fitted into just one man.
He claimed the passage of the years had calmed some of his original anger.
“I always felt this huge weight of inferiority complex on my shoulders. England was a class-riddled society, and still is in some ways,” he told me one morning in Palmyra. “And I carried that inferiority thing with me. But by now I think I’ve got most of it off my shoulders.”
I am pretty sure he read me well too, but was too decent to remark on the comparative irony of the kid with the bitter aftertaste of a silver spoon who had become an entrenched outsider, while he was the boy who walked in from the cold and became an establishment hero.
After a lifetime spent trying to capture moments in time, McCullin is necessarily philosophical in reflecting how time will turn all to dust.
“With the desire to photograph something so beautiful as Palmyra in the right light, then process the film, and make the print in the darkroom, I’m trying to resurrect something that will be lasting,” he mused, looking across the ruins one morning.
“But when I die, if I’ve left a legacy, so what? It’s not important whether I have left a name behind. I hope my work doesn’t stay in the house where I live and fade away, rot away, with time. But if it does, it doesn’t bother me.”
Though he drops names like scattered chicken corn, beneath his knighthood and the company of the rich and famous and the heaped awards, I don’t think McCullin has ever lost touch with his roots. In Aleppo that bitter winter of war in 2012, I noticed that he had looked grounded and at ease whenever we moved among the displaced families living in ruins: more than just an awareness, he had an engagement with their dignity in poverty, an ease in understanding, that came from personal experience and couldn’t be emulated by altruism alone. The damp wartime basement in Finsbury Park was not so far away.
It was the same in Palmyra. He was happy throughout the days we spent in the ruins, and he relished the early morning light when the ruins shapeshifted shadows, their textures and colours changing beneath the rising sun, and the city was empty and ghostly.
Yet he was happiest of all when, late one Friday afternoon, quite unexpectedly, the people of Tadmor left their semi-destroyed town, and moved across the road into the ancient ruins to picnic and party. Almost in an instant, the colonnades of Cardo Maximus changed from being a place of sharp shadows and yawning silence into a buzzing thoroughfare of movement, chatter and color as the locals flocked in to grasp the ancient stones in an impudent Friday night embrace.
The smoke of shisha pipes and grilled lamb drifted in tendrils among the pillars as motorbikes, camels, families and children moved between the toppled columns. Beside the ruins of the bombed-out Dedeman hotel, fighters laid down their Kalashnikovs and bathed in the warm spring water that emerged from a cave—the same spring which had allowed the desert city’s palms to flourish and given Palmyra its original name.
It felt a very intimate privilege to see such joyful reclamation after the decades of misery under the monstrous Assad dynasty and the savageries of 14 years of revolution.
Queen Zenobia was ever present too. When I asked the women there that evening how they felt about their desert queen, and whether she had any relevance to their identity today, their sentiments were unanimous.
“Queen Zenobia is our joy, our glory and we are proud to call her the Queen of Tadmor,” said one, Rim Mahmoud al-Saleh, a 40-year-old local mother who was picnicking among the ruins with her extended family. “She is not just a historical figure to us, nor just an Arab queen, but a role model to female intelligence, grace and power. She is part of our present. Nobody can erase her from our hearts.”
McCullin appeared electrified by the sudden transformation. The spontaneity of the Syrians’ delight as they left the austerity of their war-ravaged town to spread themselves among the remnants of empire and picnic on the past, their aura of impudent entitlement in doing so, stoked his energy.
There was scarce trace of age in his presence that evening. He strode around Palmyra in sudden bursts of energy, in straight lines, camera in hand, shoulders collected forward like a small bull, absorbed in the careless enjoyment of the people among the ruins, his enthusiasm deeply infectious.
“I couldn’t be more happy. I just couldn’t be happier,” he said, grinning and aglow as the lowering sun threw a golden light over the scene, as the Syrians ate and laughed among the toppled columns and scattered hubris of faith and empire.
Don’t ever die, Don, I thought, looking at the man and the stones in the gathering of the dusk. Don’t ever die.
Anthony Loyd is a writer for The Times of London
