Time.news – Nel February 1923 Thomas Edward Lawrence was forced out of the Royal Air Force after it was discovered that he had enlisted under an assumed name. ‘Lawrence d’Arabia‘, the hero of the Bedouin revolt that drove the Ottoman Empire out of the Middle East, paid for his criticisms of London for not fulfilling its promise of independence to the Arab populations. A betrayal that had even pushed him to refuse the honor offered to him by King George V.
A century after the myth of Lawrence of Arabia, sealed by David Lean’s 1962 film starring Peter O’Toole, is still alive in ‘its’ places: in Wales the house where he was born in 1888 in the village of Tremadog has been transformed into Snowdon Lodge, a hostel very popular with hikers. The house at 2 Polstead Road in Oxford where he lived as a child is commemorated by a plaque while the bedroom that housed him at Jesus College has been transformed by the Oxford University into a meeting room renamed the “TE Lawrence Room”. And in London, another blue plaque at 14 Barton Street in Westminster marks the attic where he lived for several years starting in 1919.
© David Sarsini
The Aqaba fortress
But it is above all in the Middle East that the footsteps of the best known character of the First World War can be sought. Not that there are streets, shops or monuments dedicated to him. Lawrence’s legacy is better known in the West, where he evokes the poetry of the struggle for freedom and battles in the desert, than among the Arabs who know him little or tend to play down his role in the revolt. “He’s never been a legend here,” stressed University of Jordan sociologist Sari Nasir. “He did not lead the revolt, it was an Arab revolt, he was one of many”, assured the Jordanian historian Suleiman Mousa, author of “TE Lawrence: An Arab View” in which he denounces the inaccuracies and exaggerations contained in the autobiography of the british officer, “The Seven Pillars of Wisdom”.
Still talking about Lawrence, however, are the places connected to him by books, documents, old photographs or simple stories handed down orally. In some cases there were written chapters of history, in other paragraphs of a human story that has been transfigured by the myth. In Aleppo, Syria, the Hotel Baron is still standing in which the 23-year-old Lawrence stayed for a few nights in 1914, in room 202. The bill for drinks that Lawrence consumed at the Barton’s bar but for unknown reasons fled without paying was recently exhibited in the British Museum. The hotel, a stone’s throw from the ‘suk, was built in 2011 by an Armenian (the name means ‘lord’) and quickly became a favorite with merchants and explorers. In Aleppo, the young cartographer followed the excavations, in a period in which archeology was the best cover for espionage among the European powers.
Also in Syria the other city of Lawrence is the capital Damascuswhose conquest on October 1, 1918 it marked the capitulation of the Ottoman Empire. The English officer entered the Serai, the town hall, with his men and deposed there the two Algerian collaborators who governed it on behalf of the Turks. In four days, sleeping just three hours total, Lawrence organized the new administration and established a police force. Today the building overlooking Al-Merjeh (Martyrs’ Square) is the seat of the Ministry of Information. Not far away, on Hejaz square, is the old station from which the Ottoman railway line departed for Medina: the interior maintains its original decorations and until the outbreak of the civil war, a weekly train still left for Amman. However, the civil war that broke out in 2011 cut Syria off from tourism for who knows how long.
© David Sarsini Lawrence’s house in Jeddah 
In Cairo, Egyptin 2018 it was torn down and transformed into offices in the same colonial style as the Grand Continental Hotel, on Ezbekiyya Square, where Thomas Edward lodged in room 220 for nine months, from 1914 to 1915, after enlisting in the Arab Bureau of British Intelligence at the outbreak of the Great War. Built in 1860 as part of the modernization projects linked to the Suez Canal, it was the oldest standing hotel in the capital and a piece of Egypt’s history: in 1922 the declaration of independence from Great Britain was signed.
Lawrence’s epic was mostly written on desert sand, with the assaults and sabotage of the Ottoman railway in the Hejaz and the crossing of the Jordanian Wadi Rum to take the Turks from behind and capture Aqaba.
Today, the opening of Saudi Arabia to tourism makes a tour of these places feasible for the first time. It is also possible to visit them with a new cruise which stops at the Saudi ports of Jeddah and Yanbu, the Jordanian port of Aqaba and Safaga, in Egypt, the starting point for the excursion to Cairo. And at every stop there are places that echo Lawrence’s narratives in his autobiography.
Pike “it was truly a remarkable city”, he said, “the streets narrowed into alleys enclosed by wooden sheds in the main bazaar, but elsewhere open to the sky, in the small interstices between the tops of the tall white-walled houses”. It is the description of coral palaces of Al Balad, the old city declared a Unesco World Heritage Site in 2014. The inlaid balconies of its palaces were the symbol of the opulence of the merchants, enriched by the passage of pilgrims bound for Mecca. The closed balconies in perforated teak called ‘roshan’ (from the Persian rozen, “opening in the window”) are authentic works of art with a practical function: they block the sun’s rays and guarantee discreet ventilation, channeling the air. Behind them the women could snoop on the street while remaining hidden from prying eyes.
On the Al-Bayaa square, at the entrance to the old city, the Sharbatly House, an extremely elegant four-storey house in the ‘hijazi’ style of the family of the same name which has controlled the distribution of fruit and vegetables in the country for a century. TE Lawrence allegedly lived there in 1917. The building, which now houses art exhibitions, seminars and a restaurant, was the seat of the Egyptian legation in the city for twenty years.
A Yanbu al Bahr (‘spring of the mother’)another Saudi coastal city further north divided in half between the petrochemical pole and the suggestive old city with the night market where the ships in transit used to escort, is located the three-story house where Lawrence stopped in 1916, host of the local governor. “I stayed four days waiting for the ship,” he said, “in Abdel Kader’s picturesque and rambling house which overlooked the deserted square from which innumerable caravans had departed for Medina.”
The house, another example of the typical early 1900s style of the region, had been abandoned for decades because the inhabitants of the area believed it was haunted. In 2020, however, it was restructured as part of the Crown Prince’s campaign Mohammed bin Salman to promote tourism and can now be visited.
From Yanbu it can be reached Medina to see the museum opened in 2006 on the remains of the historic Ottoman station which was part of the Hejaz railway line, repeatedly attacked by Arab rebels to cut off supplies arriving from Damascus. On March 26, 1917, Lawrence led the assault on the station Aba el Naamcompletely destroyed, in one of the guerrilla actions that made it appear in military strategy manuals.
Saudi Arabia is rediscovering its pride in the revolt that set the stage for the independence process that led to the birth of the state in 1932. Since 2019, thanks to the tensions with Turkey for its support for the Arab Spring, in the history books the rule of the Ottoman Empire is defined as an occupation and no longer as a Caliphate.
The city that more than any other is linked to the one whom the Bedouins called ‘Aurans Iblis’, Lawrence the Devil, is Aqaba, Jordan. The strategic port on the Red Sea was conquered by the Arab revolt on 6 July 1917 thanks to a daring action: the Ottoman fortress, the Mamluk castle, had cannons pointed towards the sea because it was believed that the only threat could come from British ships , especially in the middle of summer. Instead, Prince Feisal’s forces were driven through the furnace of the desert, at the cost of untold sacrifices, and took the Ottoman garrison in the rear in a legendary camel assault. Today of the sixteenth century castle, a former fortified caravanserai not far from the seafront and the gigantic flagpole with the Jordanian flag, only the ruins remain, also due to the devastating earthquake of 1995. Adjacent to the castle is a building that housed the sheriff of Mecca , Hussein, now transformed into the Archaeological Museum.
Behind Jordan’s second city, 60 kilometers further north, begins the spectacular Wadi Rum, one of the most beautiful deserts in the world also known as the Valley of the Moon: “Vast, echoing, and godlike”, called it Lawrence who entitled his autobiography, ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’, with the name he had given to one of the most impressive formations that rise from its red sands. A spectral wasteland from which outgrowths of the earth’s coast emerge similar to the spines of dinosaurs and in which Lean shot the most spectacular scenes of his film, the only ones made ‘on site’. A bas-relief depicting the face of the British liaison officer is still intact. It was in this desert that Lawrence camped with Feisal’s army, and many still live there today badiahthe Bedouins of the desert, from whose curtains comes the scent of tea and the sound of the violin rababah. We know from Lawrence’s accounts that he visited the spring of Ain Shalaleeh, near the village of Rum. In addition of course to the wonderful Nabataean city of Petra, which he called “the most beautiful place on earth”. “Not for its ruins”, he specified, “but for the colors of its rocks, all red and black with green and blue stripes, almost small corrugations and for the shapes of its stones and spiers, and for its fantastic wide gorge just enough for a camel to pass.”
East of Amman is located the Qasr Azraq (Blue Castle), a fortress in use since Roman times which in 1917 housed the headquarters of the Arab army of the North led by Prince Feisal and General Lawrence of Arabia. The guides indicate among its ruins the area where the English officer would have slept, who described “the inscrutable silence” that enveloped the area. The desolate but suggestive region is located on the border with the “jordan pan”the desert continuing into Syria to the north, Saudi Arabia to the south and Iraq to the east. Lawrence of Arabia died in a mysterious motorcycle accident in 1935 in the English countryside. But in these arid and distant lands his spirit still speaks to the traveler who wants to listen.