Historical Note
Added on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 by Carole Nash Editor
Historical Note
I had heard a lot about the Baron Hotel, especially as one of my heroes, T.E.Lawrence, had stayed there, so I thought an occasional ‘historical note’ is quite in order. After all, are we not all road warriors with more foresight than the distance between our wing mirrors? Are we not a sub-species capable of understanding what it is to be different? Let us begin!
Lying at the heart of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited city, it was in the latter half of the 19th century that Krikor Baron Mazloumian made a decision to pioneer the hotel industry in Aleppo. Having just returned from Jerusalem where he had been on a pilgrimage he decided to open up its very first hotel, which he named Ararat after Mount Ararat in historical Armenia. Catering mainly to the European traveller, his sons Onig and Armen continuing the tradition had two hotels of their own for a brief period of five years each. Aleppo Palace, Aziziah Palace and a third, the Hotel du Park, which they owned jointly, merging into what has now become the historically world famous Hotel Baron in 1911.
Coinciding with the inauguration of the Berlin, Baghdad railway line connecting with the Orient and Taurus Express and becoming the most popular and practical means of transportation for the following five decades. Built on the outskirts of the town amidst gardens at the time considered dangerous to venture after dark, it was also possible there to shoot duck. After the declaration of independence of Syria by King Faysal the 1st in 1919, some of the hotel’s first clients were T.E.Lawrence (before he became Lawrence of Arabia), Baron Max Von Oppenheimer, Gertrude Bell and General Leeman Von Saunders (no relations, different spelling).
Other guests include: President Assad, King Faysal, Lady Louise Mountbatten, Charles Lindberg, Mr and Mrs Theodore Roosevelt, Julie Christie, Agatha Christie, David Rockefeller and Dame Freya Stark.
