Aside from ranking among the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, these ancient-modern metropolises are places to take the pulse of a region. The Middle East’s cities read like a roll-call of historical heavyweights: Jerusalem, Beirut, Cairo, İstanbul, Esfahan. And when they do, they can suddenly (and forever) change the way you see the Middle East. These spontaneous, disarming and utterly genuine words of welcome can occur anywhere across the region.
Or someone will simply approach and say with unmistakable warmth, ‘Welcome’. Home of HospitalityĪt some point on your visit to the Middle East, you’ll be sitting in a coffeehouse or looking lost in a labyrinth of narrow lanes when someone will strike up a conversation and, within minutes, invite you home to meet their family and share a meal. Wherever you find yourself, the past is always present because here, perhaps more than anywhere else on earth, history is the heart and soul of the land. This is where humankind first built cities and learned to write, and it was from here that Judaism, Christianity and Islam all arose. Here, it’s a story written on the stones that litter the region, from the flagstones of old Roman roads to the building blocks of Ancient Egypt, and the delicately carved tombs and temples from Petra to Persepolis. In the Middle East, history is not something you read about in books. The Middle East is a grand epic, a cradle of civilisations and a beautiful, complicated land that's home to some of the planet's most hospitable people.
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