Bittersweet: The symbolic practice of preserving apricots in Syria

In June, on the outskirts of Damascus, apricots are everywhere, but the season is short – lasting no more than a week or two. This is maybe why, when Levantines want to give a promise they won’t keep, they use the expression ‘fel mishmash’, which literally means ‘in the apricot season’, because it comes and goes.

With its fleeting presence, the apricot season brings much life and activity. It is as if the whole region becomes obsessed with converting the fruit into something more lasting – either jam or qamar al-din, a dried sticky apricot leather. It can be made at home, but mostly happens on an industrial scale. To make qamar al-din, apricots are washed in water, then sterilised and softened with sulphur steam. The resulting mash is loaded into a peeler to get rid of the rind and seeds. Afterwards, sugar syrup is added to the mushy orange paste through continuous stirring and filtering. This is followed by drying the paste in the open air, where it is spread on wooden boards called dfoof.

The casting happens in the early morning before sunrise, so the paste does not thicken with the heat. On boards smeared with olive oil, the paste rests under the sun for four or five days. The drying space is usually divided into equal squares on boards in rows. Two carts roam between these rows, one full of paste being emptied onto the boards, and the other full of dried qamar al-din that has been carefully peeled off them. The peels are transferred to a covered area where they are cut, wrapped and stored.

During the drying season the orchards are filled with wooden boards as far as the eye can see, some a damp wood colour, others screaming in bright orange. Viewed from rooftops, the scene resembles a short-lived city, which stays until everything is wrapped into orange slabs and stacked at the entrances of the factories. Lined up vertically, the boards are left leaning on each other, exhausted from work and tanned by the sun.

The making of qamar al-din is associated with Ghouta, a suburb of Damascus. Food preservation in this region is perhaps one of the last remaining pre-industrial habits, pushed by the tradition of not wasting food and the need to eat cheaply during summer and winter. Qamar al-din is the last and always present resort for dessert, as it is consistently available when there is nothing else to eat. Yet the delicacy is not always about joy; it is also part of a story to do with refuge and displacement. In 2013, two years after the uprising in Syria and amid the subsequent civil war, the government imposed a siege on eastern Ghouta, which would extend into five years of scarcity and killing.

Stocks of qamar al-din began to make up for the food shortage. Different forms of it would be sold on stalls: as wraps for children, single sheets to be bought little by little, or even with wheat sprinkled on top as a replacement for hard-to-find flatbread. Qamar al-din became both a means to survive and a tragedy to remember. With the continuation of the siege, production of it became more difficult. Sugar syrup, sulphur and sterilising materials were no longer available. While the skies and lands were lent to death and shelling, the lengthy process of oiling boards and sun drying became shortened.

The qamar al-din that remained available was dark and turbid, with more acidity but a sweetness that persisted. Thick and chewy, yet still to be found, it became a symbol for the perseverance of this period. A friend who outlived the five years of the siege told me that they refer to the hardest years of this period as the ‘years of qamar al-din’. By the end of the siege, many of the 150 factories that produced apricot leather had been destroyed or abandoned. Ghouta lost more than 80% of its apricot trees. Qamar al-din was displaced along with the people making it, with some opening factories in other parts of Syria.

In 2020, one of Ghouta’s factories began a return to minimal production. Its wood planks are stretched under a wall riddled with bullet holes, and its machinery operates within a structure damaged by the war. With more apricot trees planted nearby, the factory was able to continue to produce through the seasons of 2021 and 2022. Today, the boards of qamar al-din are not just stacked in the factories of one region waiting for the next summer, but are spread over a much wider area. In this way, the food has become an honest expression of the state of the Syrian diaspora. I wonder if any other form of heritage practice can give such a rich cross-section of culture, agriculture and calamity, telling the story its people’s resilience?