Tour of Dir’iyyah with Karim

Karim continues as our security detail here in Riyadh – a really good guy, a very knowledgeable guy.  He took us (Rolf, Herdie, Laure and I) to a tour of this old city yesterday, Thursday, November 24^th:

• Dir’iyyah is the “historical seat” of the Saud family 
• Saud bin Mohammed, until 1725
• Wadi Hanifa
• Wahabbism (1745):  “all men created equal, one God”

Texture, texture, texture is what stands out for me the most in our little tour of this old city. 

Texture comes from the mud and stones used to make the houses.  In the last decade, it has hardly rained, so this sort of material is fine.  I don’t know what else they’ve included in the material to hold it together, but a burst of rain could erode it quickly.

Texture is sometimes more visual for me, though it’s still tactile.

It also comes from the gravel.  The thatch used as roofing.  The logs to reinforce it.  The steel that emerged following wood.

Better known as trash

At first I thought this city was ancient, but the dilapidation we saw left remnants of modern society:

• Pepsi cans
• Marlboro packs
• Al-Rabie juice boxes
• Broken ceramic
• A girl’s slipper

The city was obviously no longer inhabited, but in its time it housed a handful of the princes:

• Mohammed bin Saud
• Fahad bin Saud
• Thinayah bin Saud
• Nassir bin Saud
• Saad bin Saud

Karim said that when the Ottomans pulled out of Arabia, they “took” the Thinayahs.  When King Abdulaziz went to Turkey, he asked to see the Thinayahs.  Apparently he saw a woman who was captivating.  His son (Faisal?) was quite captivated by her, too.  Knowing that he had just a moment to act, before his father did, he asked for her hand in marriage. 

Karim described this woman, Effa (sp?), as in ‘pristine’ (my word). 

Herdie, Laure, Rolf and I, on our tour of Dir'iyyah (2005)

What else about Dir’iyyah?

The “desert cooler” is an AC device:  Water is fed across a mesh or screen, then electricity powers a fan that blows cool air into a room.

We saw a small school house.  A group of Arabic student visiting wrote their names on the wall.

This is the thing, for me, now:  There was some graffiti on the walls or doors.  Before, I would’ve taken umbrage for this.  But now I take this as part of the history that this old city holds, and that history includes not only its actual inhabitants but also its subsequent visitors. 

Some Western names were also etched recently on a wall:  Deb, Greg 2004. 

By a little shelter that we called a “bus stop”:  a “bunch of bachelors” called themselves “A.N.A.”  Then they wrote down the names of their future children:  for example, “Abu” (meaning father of).  It just occurs to me that by writing it as “Abu,” they (this bunch) were revealing their names. 

Speaking of names, for the millions and millions of Arab men, it seems to me that they use amongst them a very limited number of names.  So, writing their names on that fateful moment on the bus stop doesn’t really reveal who they are.

The doors are simple, like everything else about the construction of these houses:  made of wood with some simple patterns painted on.  Each panel didn’t align perfectly against each other, but still they must have used a tool like a planer to create a flat surface on both sides of the door.

The route Karim walked us through seemed, in part, a walk through the historical development of these houses: 

• From wooden doors, to steel doors
• From largely earth tones, to the advent of pastel green, red and blue
• From mud and stone, to something that looks more like concrete

Still, I’m amazed that all of this seems backward for a city that was inhabited fairly recently (i.e., 20-30 years ago).  And the “palaces” of the princes were downright plebeian.  Maybe they weren’t prominent princes.  In one house, Karim pointed to a bathtub that was perhaps 2/3^rds the size of a typical bathtub in the US.

The current Royal Princes have truly palatial residence that we saw in the dark en route to the Nancy Charles-Parker’s house in the Diplomatic Quarters.   

There are wooden downspouts emerging from the roofing.  Given that there has hardly been rain in the last decade, I wondered if they served any other function.  Apparently not. 

There were triangle holes across the top portions of the taller structures:  They were decorative as well as military in purpose.  We walked along an elevated platform, and the wall had these triangle openings.

At one point, we looked down into a Shangri-La (my word):  a seeming oasis of green expanse, small plants, several trees, a rudimentary irrigation system.  There has so much rain in the past that it can flood these lowering lying areas and create water levels of several feet high.