The heavily inked bartender poured the Flaming Lamborghini, set it alight, and said this was the safest place to get a drink in Syriaβignoring the fact that we were a mile over the DMZ in the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights. Too many drinks into our exploration of the buzzing nightlife in Majdal Shams, we could only nod, grimace, and sip it up with a straw. When we first heard there were a smattering of fantastic bars in this remote village over 3.
But a bartender at a newly opened speakeasy in Jerusalem confirmed to us that not only did the bars in Majdal exist, they were indeed worthy of the seven-hour round-trip. One of our traveling companions was in the market for a oil-burning stove, so when we pulled into town we stopped at a purveyor of such goods. It turned out that his son, Jad, had lived for a decade in Cleveland and speaks impeccable English. Jad, in his late 30s with black hair that is just starting to grey, explained that there were no bars in Majdal Shams when he was younger.
Initially there was pushback from the village elders, for whom the idea of Druze youths drinking booze was disagreeable. The sight of four white Americans striding down the street turned more than a few curious heads. Far off the beaten path of Christian and Jewish holy sites, the village only gets a trickle of outside visitors, mostly during the brief but frenetic ski season. The Flaming Lamborghini that ended our night was poured by Marcel, a Druze who grew up in and studied mixology in Prague.
Even the old man trying to sell us a wood-burning stove wanted to tell us about the time he saw the Pope in Rome. At Why? Photo by the author. Syria rewarded them with free scholarships, leaving the village with an educated and prosperous population of doctors, dentists, and other professionals. The Soviet Union also used to provide many scholarships to boys from the village, as part of its outreach program to the Arab world.
Despite their pro-Syrian politics, many Majdalis prefer to travel abroad using Israeli documentation, which make it easy to get visas to the US and most European countries.
