Ammon News - AMMONNEWS - The tour guides sat in a dusty white trailer a few steps from the main gate, drinking thick black coffee and smoking. There were 42 of them, ready to a visitor around a world-renowned archaeological site in any of nine languages. But even though it was a sunny spring day, there was no work for 38 of them.

“Four years ago, I would do two to four tours a day for visitors,” said Ahmed al-Qaim, 43, who has been a tour guide for the past 19 years. “Now, we mostly just sit around discussing things like, ‘How do you like your coffee?’ ”

The ruins of ancient Gerasa, known now as Jerash, are among the best preserved of any provincial city of the Roman Empire. The monuments and temples, baths and amphitheaters, plazas and colonnaded streets transport visitors back to the first few centuries A.D., when the city prospered under emperors like Trajan, Hadrian and Antoninus. The marks of chariot wheels can still be seen in the ancient paving stones.

The 160-acre site has been one of Jordan’s main tourist attractions, and a sustainable long-term source of revenue. But it is just 20 miles from the border with Syria, where a civil war has been raging for four years — and the region’s conflicts are anything but a magnet for foreign visitors.
Sites all over Jordan are suffering. In 2010, the year before the Arab Spring erupted across the region, some 8.2 million people visited the country, according to the World Bank, but by 2013 the figure was down to 5.4 million, and it is still falling. And many of the foreigners who do come now are not tourists, but people drawn here by the very turmoil that keeps the tourists away: aid workers, diplomats, journalists, refugees.

The Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities says visits to Jerash are off by 35 percent this year from a year ago. At some other sites, like Mount Nebo, Wadi Rum and Karak, the fall has been even sharper, almost half.

“When I look around the region, I see there’s nothing to be optimistic about,” said Ahmad Shami, the antiquities ministry official in charge of Jerash. “We have a responsibility to promote and preserve Jerash, because this place belongs to the world and to humanity.”

Some Jordanians say that what the ministry calls a problem is really an opportunity.

“Nobody is going to Yemen, Syria or Iraq,” said Thiab Atoom, who recently opened a restaurant on the way to the main gate at Jerash. “This is not something that should only work against us — it should also be an opportunity to say, ‘Jordan is a haven; come here!’ But we aren’t doing enough to lure in visitors.”

Mr. Atoom stood outside, greeting the trickle of tourists who passed by and pointing to photographs of the barbecued meat and appetizers he offers. The large seating area inside remained desolate and dim.

Surrounded by his waiters and a few tour guides, he said ruefully, “Inside this ancient site, we are reviving the dead, but we’re killing the livelihoods of the people living outside.”

The government and the tourism industry here have tried a few modest initiatives: discount airline tickets, visa fee waivers, a social media campaign. But even the minister of tourism, Nael al Fayez, has said publicly that much more needs to be done.

The intrepid tourists who do come to Jordan’s archaeological sites often have other parts of the region on their itinerary as well, including Israel, the West Bank and Egypt. Jack Spears, an American from Phoenix, flew to Jerusalem first before making his way to Jerash, 30 miles north of Amman, the Jordanian capital. As he completed his tour of the ruins here, he stopped to look at the monumental Arch of Hadrian at the entrance, erected to honor the emperor’s visit to the city in A.D. 129.

“When you start off, it looks small, and like there’s not much to see,” he said of the sprawling site. “But the more you go in, the bigger and better it becomes.”

In calmer times a few years ago, it was easy for visitors to book a tour with stops at three spectacular ancient sites — starting at Petra, the famous city carved from rose-colored stone cliffs in southern Jordan, then Jerash, and on to Palmyra in Syria.

Palmyra has much in common with Jerash: Both were crossroads of cultures in the ancient world, and both feature well-preserved colonnades and majestic Roman amphitheaters. But Palmyra recently fell under the control of the Islamic State extremist group, which has been known to loot or smash many cultural artifacts. According to the Britain-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the Islamic State used the amphitheater in Palmyra to kill nearly two dozen prisoners.

That same week in Jerash, about 40 girls in blue school uniforms smiled and greeted a small group of Chinese tourists, who posed for group photos holding umbrellas to shade them from the sun.

The schoolgirls formed a circle in the center of the southern amphitheater, where Roman acoustic design ensured that anyone in the 3,000 seats would be able to hear them clearly. With their teacher in the middle, they sang and recited multiplication tables.

Visitors to Jerash are guided past the longstanding colonnades of the city to the temple of Artemis, the goddess of the hunt revered by the Greek portion of the ancient population. The temple is surrounded by “whispering” columns nearly 50 feet tall, and guides are eager to demonstrate how, with slight pressure, a column can actually move.

(One of the temple’s columns now stands not in Jordan but in Queens. King Hussein, the father of the current monarch, presented the column to New York City in 1964 as a gift for the World’s Fair, and it can be seen in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park in a grove of trees east of the Unisphere.)

Recent excavations that Jerash has been inhabited since the Bronze Age, leaving behind layers of antiquities from the Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Umayyad civilizations. The modern city has about 200,000 inhabitants, and the main market is just outside the archaeological site, with rows of clothing and accessory shops and vegetable stands, surrounded by mosques, masonry houses and run-down apartments.

Experts say that no more than one-quarter of the ancient city has been excavated, and that important Roman ruins probably lie under markets and houses.

The slump in tourism threatens many jobs in Jerash, and some antique shops have already shut down. Local residents and business owners cast blame in many directions — at the warring sides in the region for scaring visitors away, at the government and the tourism industry for doing too little to woo them back, at the international community for not solving the crisis and ending the brutal violence.

If things do not get better soon, “it will be a tragedy,” said Mr. Shami at the antiquities ministry. “What will the result be when all these people lose their livelihoods?”

*New York Times