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tea. He pointed out the sounds of the birds. I asked him how Ma’loula remained so peaceful.
    â€˜Early on in this war, I met with the main religious leaders in the community: the bishop and the mother superior of the main convent,’ Diab said. ‘We decided that even ifthe mountains around us were exploding with fighting, we would not go to war.’
    Diab had not been born and raised in Ma’loula, but was educated here, married here. He was, at that time, also in the Syrian Parliament. He was a Sunni, he said, but that did not mean he wanted his city to be torn to bits.
    â€˜It’s a sectarian war, in politics it’s another name,’ he said with a shrug. ‘But the fact is, there is no war here in Ma’loula. Here, we all know each other.’
    Tolerance had been a tradition in Ma’loula since St Takla – the daughter of a pagan prince, an early disciple of St Paul, and possibly even his wife – had fled to these mountains in the first century AD. She was escaping from soldiers sent by her father, who threatened to kill her for her religious beliefs.
    The legends – and the old people – say Takla was exhausted and finding her way blocked by the sharp, rocky sides of a mountain, she fell on her knees in desperate prayer. The mountains parted. ‘Ma’loula’ means ‘entrance’ in Aramaic.
    â€˜Here in these mountains are all different people, different religions. But we decided adamantly that Ma’loula would not be destroyed,’ Diab said.
    At the ancient shrine of St Takla, Christian nuns – true believers in the Assad government – lived isolated, quiet lives, devoted to God and country. They slept in small, spotlessly clean chambers and passed their time working, praying and tending to the needs of the sick. They also ran an orphanage.
    The convent was silent except for constant, shrill birdsong and the sound of nuns scurrying up and down marble stairswith large glass jars of the golden-coloured fruit, which they made and sold. They would dry the apricots in boxes in the courtyard, and the scent of the hot fruit was as heavy as the incense in the chapel.
    The convent is one of forty holy sites in Ma’loula, which before the war was a place where Muslims and Christians prayed to cure infertility or other ailments, and drank water from the crack in the rock that St Takla is said to have parted with her prayers.
    But religion is not an issue, said Mother Sayaf, a Greek Catholic who has lived in this convent for thirty years. She spoke to me in a quiet, completely darkened room – shuttered from the fierce light – and one of the younger nuns brought glasses of iced water on a lacquered tray. She said the air was so fresh that Ma’loula was a place where doctors sent sick people to recuperate.
    â€˜We had an Iraqi Muslim man who was badly wounded, who came here to be healed,’ she said, meaning they would treat someone regardless of religion. At the same time, she made no secret of her devotion to Assad. Two years later, when the jihadists entered Ma’loula, her devotion to the regime would be tested.
    I returned several times to Ma’loula to visit the monastery and the nuns. When I last went, in November 2012, as people fled embattled Homs, Damascus and Aleppo to seek refuge with relatives overseas or in the few still peaceful parts of Syria, people were returning to Ma’loula as a sort of safe haven.
    â€˜It’s my country,’ said Antonella, a Syrian-American who left Los Angeles and Miami three years ago to return to her birthplace and start a café. She sat down inside her café – no electricity – and showed me maps. She reminded me Ma’loula was a UNESCO-protected heritage site, which she felt would somehow exclude them from being blown to bits.
    Antonella had a chance to leave when the war started and fighting was close to Ma’loula,