Since the despotic regime of Bashar al-Assad collapsed in December, residents of Damascus have noticed a new presence on the streets at night: shadowy figures with blinking metal detectors.
In the countryside too, men have been arriving on private farmland clutching shovels and maps claiming to reveal locations of underground riches. Liberated from the fear that pervaded Assad-era Syria, but still enduring widespread poverty and the legacy of war, Syrians have caught the gold bug.
“Under the regime, it was impossible to go hunting on a moonlit night” because of the danger of being caught, said Abu Wael, 67, a self-proclaimed “professional” treasure hunter.
Now, that has changed. Metal detectors could not previously be bought in Syria, said retailers, but this year several stores have opened in the capital entirely dedicated to the devices. They sell models costing up to $10,000, their storefronts decorated with images of Syrian flags, gold nuggets and men brandishing the latest detectors.
One retailer said a small number of people had been secretly digging for treasure for decades, but after Assad’s fall, efforts surged because of the “flexibility in purchasing of these machines”. Like most people interviewed, he declined to be named because of the sensitivity of the topic.
The retailer said many Syrians fervently believe in buried treasure because “our region is the cradle of many civilisations”. Some customers suspect they have valuables buried in their land, he added, typically as a result of family lore passed on for generations.
“But we get a lot of people who do this as a hobby. Those going camping find it a fun pastime. There’s even machines made for children,” he said. “We sell the child sizes in green and pink.”
Another salesman said he had sold dozens of detectors from his small Damascus store, which displays a large poster of its “metal and water detector machines”. Inside are handheld German, Chinese and American detectors, as well as expensive, heavy-duty long-range devices. Salesmen said some Syrians had even flown in from neighbouring countries to join the hunt.
Treasure hunting has a hold on the Syrian psyche partly because of the country’s rich history. For generations, Syrians have swapped legends of buried treasure, of ancient gold and invaluable artefacts left behind by long-gone civilisations and travellers along the Silk Road or pilgrims heading to Saudi Arabia.
“Everyone in our region knows some relative who was once digging in their house and found a jar filled with gold,” said Amr al-Azm, a Syrian professor of Middle Eastern history and anthropology at Shawnee State University in Ohio, who worked in the state’s antiquities department before the war. “It’s part of our region’s mythology.”
But under the Assad regime, such digging excursions were illegal, purportedly to protect heritage sites. Those who dared dig did so in the dark, and told no one.
When a security vacuum took hold after the fall of the Assad dynasty, Syrians — 90 per cent of whom live in poverty, according to the UN — flocked to heritage sites to get their hands on artefacts and began digging in their backyards and tearing down walls in search of hidden fortunes.
Al-Azm said: “The war in Syria destroyed the economy and destroyed people’s livelihoods, so people searched for other income sources.” The concept did not seem far-fetched as most Syrians, he said, “live on top of an archaeological site, next door to an archaeological site, or a stone’s throw away from an archaeological site.”
A rumour gripped Damascus: a handful of men had allegedly dug up ancient treasure, becoming wealthy overnight — though the number of men, location and type of treasure varied with each telling. Experts the Financial Times spoke to for this piece dismissed the story, saying that if gold was found, it had probably been looted from museums or the homes of Assad regime cronies who adorned their mansions with antiquities.
No findings have so far been confirmed. But Syrians were electrified by the rumours, especially after years of watching the regime and its soldiers pilfer and loot where they could.
A member of the government’s media office said the excavation remained “technically illegal”. “But [the government] is turning a blind eye because it is not able to chase after everyone and send patrols to all areas,” they said.
Retailers around the region have piled into the sales opportunity, including via Facebook: one store in the United Arab Emirates, marketing specifically to Syrian customers, offers shipping and promises metal detectors allegedly suited for Syria’s rocky and basaltic soil. Another offers a detector that displays a 3D rendering of buried items and determines depth.
A recent fad is a waterproof version for those scuba diving for gold.
Al-Azm said hunters often targeted areas around the Hejaz railway — which operated in the early 20th century and connected Damascus to Medina in Saudi Arabia — believing the area to be littered with gold. Some believe retreating Ottoman forces, defeated by the British in Jerusalem in 1917, buried gold chests on the way north, he added.
Syria’s museums boast hundreds of thousands of artefacts and manuscripts, including Greek statues and 2nd-century murals. About 300,000 were reportedly hidden at secret locations during the bloody years after the civil war began in 2011; in 2018, when the war had become less fierce, some were put on display at the national museum.
It is unclear how many artefacts were stolen or destroyed during the war, which started in 2011. Antiquities experts and local news sites claim that stolen gold crowns, crosses, and coins made their way via Turkey to the homes of the super-rich around the world.
Such illegal, international sales, Abu Wael said, would not take place online. But opportunists have now seized on the chance to sell their “finds”. “Most of what’s being offered for sale, on social media or by word of mouth of supposedly Ottoman or Roman gold coins, is fake,” said Azm. He attributed the deluge to “people’s overactive imagination”.
Other items were probably stolen goods, he said. “I’ve already been offered and have seen real examples of significant artefacts from different parts of Syria. This sharply increased after the fall of the regime, and is a result of the security vacuum which unfortunately took place after the fall.”
Abu Wael described the dangers of going out to the field on what he called “real” gold hunting missions, including the risk of attacks from locals who would notice the excavations and hunt the gold hunters to seize anything they found.
On his phone are videos of some discoveries sent to him by other hunters looking for buyers: one shows the careful unravelling of a brittle, gold-lettered Hebrew scroll, echoing tales of ancient treasure buried in Jewish cemeteries.
Speaking in hushed tones in a crowded Damascus café, Abu Wael said that after 40 years of treasure hunting, he knows that riches are not easily found. He accused metal-detector salesmen of tricking people into spending their meagre savings on a pipe dream.
Abu Wael said so-called witches and wizards — the most prominent dubbed the Red Sheikh — charged people to “read” signage and ancient scrolls that supposedly led to treasures.
A veteran hunter, Abu Wael has been searching for 40 years and never found treasure. He once came close, though, he said: years ago, after deciphering a series of signs for weeks and digging in several locations, he returned to his final dig site only to find it upturned.
“The villagers told me a group of men had dug overnight and found a chest of gold,” he said. “But it’s probably best: we have a saying, ‘whoever finds gold, loses his mind’.”
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