العادات والتقاليد الأجتماعية في حمص ١٢_a .. كتاب حمص

* Nightlife:

It differs according to the season, age, and gender. On warm summer nights, the children play in the neighborhood until after the evening prayer, then each of them goes home, and the burden falls on the mother to wash their feet, hands, and faces before sleeping if the mother is clean. Otherwise, the children sleep in their clothes, and most of them do not have nightcaps, and pajamas are common in Homs only before the outbreak of World War II (1939 AD). As for young people, they went to cafés, and in the second half of the nineteenth century they were distributed among the neighborhoods of the city within the wall. We counted the number of cafés mentioned in the documents during the era that we are studying, and they reached (37) cafés. Its patrons are young men and some elderly people who are not clerics. The sheikhs and clerics are discouraged from frequenting it, and children are deterred from frequenting it by etiquette, and women are completely forbidden to them.

There was no special construction of cafés until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Most of them were outside the wall, and the café was not large enough to include two adjacent shops, the wall separating them removed, or one shop in the neighborhood cafes. Here are two tables: the first includes the names of the cafés that were within the wall and the second that was built outside the wall, along with their locations and the dates of the documents mentioned in them.

The oldest and longest-lasting of these cafés is the Café Beni al-Sibai (in Aouina al-Hamma), known as Café al-Hammam. It is built on the western side of Jam (Annaba) and overlooks the east. Its door is on a square surrounded by houses, shops, and an (Atmaz) oven from the northern side of the square. Babah is the thinnest city in the south. It has been in existence for one hundred and forty years, that is, since the middle of the last century. It is still as it was, unaffected by the manifestations of modernization. Its furniture is still limited to the floor and small straw chairs for sitting and reclining. It does not have a high chair or a table, and pigeons are still raised there as they were since then. A century and a half, and from here came its name (Qahwat al-Hamam). At that time, it was a gathering for the leaders of the neighborhoods and a meeting place for its men. Because at that time it was in the middle of the city, and the old Saraya was not more than a hundred meters away from it, to the southwest of it in Souq al-Hob, and from here it gained its importance, despite the The developments that the country went through: expansion in area and modernization in construction. It has remained, until now, a living witness to the life of the last century and a speaking image of it. Then its importance shifted to (Al-Geneina) coffee shop in the hashish market after the government house was built, which is the new (Saraya) established by the Kaimakam. Homs at that time was Mahmoud Pasha Al-Barazi (1304 AH = (1887 AD), as we mentioned previously, after the country expanded and began to extend from the north. On the west side, it is outside the scope of the wall.

It is noted that there are cafes named after their founder and investor: Abdul Majeed Al-Rifai Coffee in Bab Al-Duraib, Haj Yousef Al-Khawaja Coffee in the back of the cave, and Abdul Rahman Al-Jundi Coffee, which occupied the southern part of Khan Al-Jundi.