Damascus Room

From the visitor opening, let your eye follow the gold details across the dark wooden panels. Niches interrupt the walls, and bands of writing run above them. Most of this woodwork bears the date 1707. Forty stanzas of poetry formed part of the room’s decoration. This was a winter reception room in Damascus. Its raised seating area, called the tazar, stands above a lower antechamber known as the ataba. The change in floor level organized the room around the space where people sat. You can see that relationship from the viewing area. The surfaces once had more varied colors. Craftspeople built up decoration in gesso, a plaster-like material, then added gold and tin leaf, colored glazes and paint. Successive coats of maintenance varnish darkened them over time. The museum also changed the way you approach the room. The opening through which you look would originally have been a wall with a cupboard. Its doors are now mounted in the passage leading here. The installation lets you see the raised interior across an opening that its original visitors would never have used.