“Watch out for the donkey!”, Mrs J shouted and slammed on her imaginary brake on the passenger side of the Pajero.
We were pulling into the roundabout on the outskirts of Mirbat and a local donkey, being a law-abiding animal, was also using the roundabout. I wasn’t sure what the Highway Code said about priority in roundabouts when it came to donkeys, not in a particular hurry. So we stopped the car with screeching brakes and let him exit in his own sweet time. He took the Salalah exit.
We, on the other hand, turned right towards Mirbat. I was excited to revisit and photograph the old houses and beautifully carved windows and doors, which had fascinated me more than 15 years earlier.
Mirbat had in its heydays been one of the most important ports in the region. From here merchant ships would leave loaded with frankincense and return with staples like rice and grains from East Africa and the Asian subcontinent. Large fishing dhows would dock and unload their catch. With this busy trading, Mirbat became the home for many wealthy sea merchants having made a good life for themselves.
Walking into the old part of Mirbat, we soon got a taste of its former glory. The most characteristic feature of the old Mirbat houses was the fact that many of them were multi-storey. It was the high-rise of yesteryear. These merchant houses had served several purposes. Firstly, the ground floors had been used for the storage of fishing equipment and all the goods and wares brought to and from the ships. The upper floors were residential and kept light and airy with rows of beautifully screened windows allowing the breeze to cool rooms and for the successful sea merchant to lean back with his morning coffee while still being able to oversee the unloading of his ships in the harbour. But not only that. The big houses served, much like Facebook today, to show to the rest of the world just how successful and wealthy you were. The ships were built of local stones and clad in a clay mortar and the facades were then often decorated with bas-relief motifs of the ships owned by the sea merchant. A ‘look-at-me-and-what-made-me-rich’ kind of thing.
A gentle stroll through the maze of old pathways took Mrs J and I passed several of these once magnificent status symbols now left to crumble. Most of them had been stripped of their impressive windows and doors, imported from as far away places like Zanzibar, and the decay, which often follows in hot pursuit of abandonment, had set in. Many of the buildings had been left to fall into ruin and I struggled to find the ones I had photographed 15 years ago. Their beautiful doors gone and probably made into dining and coffee tables so popular with us expats. Why, I wondered, why had these houses been allowed to disappear and in doing so, taken with them a piece of history?
The answer was a change in financial and social structure brought about by new roads, infrastructure and easier access to the rest of Oman. We were told that in the 80s many families left their homes and build themselves new, modern houses with the improvement of tap water, electricity, new kitchens and proper bathrooms, along the periphery of the ‘Old Mirbat’. Fair enough, everybody longs for new shiny, clean showers, and an AC to keep them cool in Oman’s fierce summer. But people weren’t just turning their backs on an old inconvenient house, they were also leaving behind their heritage, their history and what had shaped their cultural identity.
Ali brought us two cups of hot karak. We sat outside his dusty coffee shop on homemade, very unstable benches.
“You look sad”, Mrs J remarked.
“Hmmm, yes, things are changing”, I replied quietly.
“Change is inevitable”, she concluded. We sat for a while pondering.
“It’s not that I’m against change per se”, I tried to sound convincing “but it has to be changed for the better, not just change for the sake of change”.
Mrs J tilted her head slightly and smiled at me “Better? ..better for who, though…?”
I hated when she caught me out.
