"...as if Latin were still spoken in villages near Rome."

I remember reading in some newspaper or other, sometime before Mel Gibson's Passion of the Christ was released, about a little village in the hills outside Damascus where they still spoke Aramaic—the language that Jesus spoke.

It was said that Mel spent some time in this village to get the hang of Aramaic pronunciation for his movie.

Today I paid a 35-cent bus fare, and went and visited that village.

I didn't actually track down any Aramaic speakers. I'm not sure that it would have done me that much good if I'd tried. When I get to the point where I have a useful basic vocabulary in Arabic maybe I'll try on a second ancient Middle Eastern language.

I did meet some friendly Orthodox nuns at the convent, one of whom told me the story of St. Thecla, legendary student of St. Paul, for whom God miraculously split the mountain so she could escape... um, snakes? lions? her father? I forget what was besetting her at that precise moment, but following the picturesque little stream through the narrow rift in the mountain is pretty cool—kind of like a mini-Petra. Not for claustrophobes I should mention.

There is a real downturn in tourism in Syria in the past few years. Perhaps the most striking remains on the top of the cliffs over Maalula is the hotel, which I'm sure had a fresh gleam on it just a few years ago. It's strange to see a large, thoroughly modern hotel, in the midst of tourism season, with a grand total of two cars parked in front. It's too bad they had to ruin the view from the cliff with a hotel that was rendered spurious just a few years after it was built.

But perhaps the tourists will come back. Mel or no Mel.