Setting up the sobia

In Damascus there are now many apartments and homes with central heating, but in the old city where we live, the traditional sobia stove-heaters are still the standard method of keeping warm in the winter. The cold has not been too bad yet, especially in the middle of the day, but nights in Damascus are quite chilly now; you wouldn’t go out without a coat and scarf. (I know that sounds mild to many of you who have had snow already!)

We held off on having a sobia installed in our room because we knew it would involve moving the furniture around and lots of cleaning, but this week we decided to go ahead with it. We had planned on installing it on Thursday, but Josh stayed home sick from the university that day, so I asked our landlords if we could push the installation back a day or two. They said no problem, but then proceeded to do us a “favor” by bringing in all the apparatus mid-day on Thursday while Joshua was sleeping. About an hour later, the room was in shambles but the sobia was installed.

Every room which is outfitted to be heated by sobia has a round circular hole in the wall somewhere into which a ventilation pipe can be fitted. Behind one of the dingy cross-stitched pictures on our wall was a round hole, and our landlords installed a pipe coming horizontally out of that hole. The pipe is L-shaped – it protrudes horizontally until it reaches about the middle of the room, then it bends and descends until it connects to the back of a small vertical stove. Connected to the stove is a reservoir of mazott, or heating oil, which can be adjusted to drip into the stove at a certain rate. To start the stove you turn on the oil drip, slightly douse a piece of toilet paper with oil, then light it and put it inside the stove where it lights the oil there. The heat of the flame in the stove depends on the rate of the oil drip.

In order to accommodate a small, hot stove in our slightly crowded room, we had to separate our two rather large beds, which were previously side by side and taking up the bulk of the space. We now have a small open area where we have set up a table to study and eat. While cleaning up from the installation of the sobia (these walls are such that if you touch them, the paint falls off in your hand), I decided to do an all-out cleaning job and washed the curtains adorning two full sides of our room (which didn’t seem to have been washed for several years). They turned from a dingy grey to silvery-white. It’s such a wonderful feeling to be both clean and warm!