Many food items are named after a foreign city, perhaps their place of origin or the port from which they were shipped. We dine on hamburgers, Brussels sprouts, Seville or Valencia oranges, lima beans, parmesan cheese, New York cuts or London broil, Neapolitan ice cream, Manila clams, Vienna sausages, frankfurters, tangerines, Jerusalem artichokes, Peking duck, Muscovy duck, and Bombay duck (the last, oddly enough, a kind of fish). And then there’s the “damson,”

the sourish plum variety which these days we’re most likely to encounter in preserves, or fermented and distilled into slivovitz. The damson’s scientific name is Prunus communis, var. damascena, and the OED traces its history back through many different spellings—“damacyne,” “dampson,” “dammosen,” “dampsing”—to Damascus in Syria, from where the fruit came to northern Europe via Greece and Italy. No one knows when the importation began, but the connection between plums and Damascus was established at least as early as the seventh century CE, when the encyclopedist Isidore of Seville (was he eating a Seville orange at the time?) took note of it. The OED gives ca. 1400 as the date of the earliest uses of “damson” in English.

Six centuries later, as I write this essay, Syria is in the news as a place of terrible conflict, with a ruthless dictatorial regime locked in seemingly unending battle with rebels, not to mention the Islamic State in the Levant. The news stories have made it all too easy for us in the West to think of Syria as a barbaric place, an exporter of nothing but violence, refugees, and bitterness, and so it is particularly important to remember the long history of civilization in the country, its richness and fertility. “Are not Abana and Pharpar, the rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of Israel?” asks Naaman the Syrian army commander (II Kings 5:12). In post-Biblical times, during the long centuries when Europe slept through the dark ages, Syria and especially its capital Damascus were by contrast enlightened and sophisticated. The city was famous for its architecture and gardens; one of the Arabic epithets for Damascus is “City of Jasmine.”

This history of civilization is hinted at in several English words, all of which have to do with the finer things of life, and all of which seem to have originated in Damascus. There is damask, a silken or linen fabric elaborately woven or printed with designs, nowadays often used in table napkins. The damask-rose (Rosa gallica, var. damascena), fragrant and pink, is the source of damask powder, damask water, and attar of roses, “attar” itself, incidentally, being a word from Arabic. When in Twelfth Night (2.4.111) Shakespeare wanted to write of the color of blushing, he thought of the damask-rose: “She never told her love, / But let concealment like a worm i’ th’ bud / Feed on her damask cheek.”  Moving from the feminine realm to the masculine, we encounter Damascus blades made of Damascus steel, the finest examples of the swordsmith’s art, especially when damascened, that is, ornamented with a pattern like waves flowing in water. More generally, damascened metalwork is that which is filled with incised designs, filigree work, often in gold and silver.

These are the items I try to think of in the morning, listening to yet another story on NPR about rebels fighting the Syrian security forces, as I spread damson jam on my English muffin.