Photograph by AFP/Getty Images.

The taxi pulled up to the curb near Bab Touma, and it was clear, even before it came to a halt, that this place, in the Christian quarter of Damascus and one of the oldest parts of the city, was not the same as it had been in the late summer of 2011, just a few months into the uprising, when I was last here. But then, why would it be?

That Syria is gone, replaced by a country of shards. No corner of this ancient land is untouched by the war, now almost three years old. It has left over a hundred and twenty thousand dead, at least half a million wounded, and displaced close to a third of the population. It’s most obvious in the northern belt bordering Turkey, seeping south and east toward the Iraqi border, where many towns and villages have been pulverized by regime airstrikes and artillery, and where even colors seem to have died. Gray, red and black predominate: the mounds of gray rubble that were once homes, the red of so much blood spilled, the black Islamist banners of many rebel units, flying alongside or instead of the more secular three-starred revolutionary flag.

The war is also in government strongholds like Damascus, despite their veneer of relative normalcy. Unlike in rebel areas, many people in the capital still have jobs to go to, children still have schools to attend. The United Nations says that, across Syria, more than three thousand schools have been damaged or destroyed, and another nine hundred or so turned into shelters for the displaced.

Damascus is still a city where the country’s multi-sectarian, multi-ethnic communal mosaic is on display, and, if anything, it has been accentuated by the influx of thousands of people displaced by violence elsewhere. It’s not like Baghdad, carved into cantons by a maze of concrete blast walls keeping its people apart based on sectarian affiliation, but it is a city of barricades.

It is choked by concrete checkpoints, and strained by rationing. There are long lines at gas stations, where people can wait eight hours or more to fill their tanks, and there are frequent power cuts. Traffic jams snarl around thigh-high barriers painted in the state’s two-starred flag, and around short blast walls that block key roads housing government and security offices. It is at once a city that has expanded due to the human influx, but it has also shrunk in terms of the areas accessible to regular people.

I stepped out of the taxi and walked toward a white fabric banner, several metres long, tautly pinned to the ancient stone wall of Bab Touma, one of the seven gates that led into Roman-era Damascus. “The nation’s security is the responsibility of all,” it said in red ink, near a framed portrait of a stern-looking President Bashar al-Assad, in aviators and a military cap, army-camouflage sleeves rolled up to his elbows, arms folded across his chest.

Checkpoints of plump sandbags abutted the majestic, ancient stones on either side of the gate. People freely walked passed them, toward a cobblestone path leading to the Biblical Street Called Straight, traversed by the apostle Paul, who the Bible says was struck blind on the road to Damascus and came here to find a man who would baptize him.

Six large banners of various shapes were pinned to the other side of the ancient wall, depicting the government’s “martyrs,” including one of a member of the Shiite Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which is fighting alongside Assad’s troops. The group’s canary-yellow flag was in the background, behind the dead man’s bearded face. Another banner showed the Virgin Mary hovering above nine dead men in uniform, a Syrian flag between her outstretched hands. The area has been shelled and bombed by Syrian rebels several times over the past two years, killing more than a dozen people, and rattling a minority Christian community that most rebels still largely view as frightened and neutral, trying to stay out of the conflict.

Although the Syrian war remains primarily a political fight, in the sense that the mainly Sunni rebels will not spare Sunnis fighting for and supporting the Alawite-led regime, and there are some, although not many, Alawites, Christians, and other minorities within rebel ranks, sectarian attitudes have hardened. The longer this conflict drags on, the harder they will become. Syria was a country where it was considered rude to ask someone his or her sect, though the question was in the background, and at times decisive, heavily cloaked in the secularism of the Assads’ Baath Party. Both Bashar al-Assad and his father and predecessor, Hafez, stacked their regimes with their Alawite co-religionists, who account for only twelve per cent of the population. (At least seventy per cent of Syrians are Sunni.)

I walked down the narrow path to the Street Called Straight. Small stores line it, selling everyday items like groceries and cell-phone cards, but many others display the work of Syria’s exceptional artisans, such as the intricate, handcrafted inlaid woodwork renowned across the region. The dusty antique stores brimming with treasures were mostly closed, their wooden shutters drawn and padlocked. The tourists who once flocked here have stayed away.

Instead, other things that were not present before have become common, like men in casual clothes manning small checkpoints that are often little more than a thin flagpole in the middle of the narrow street. The men are armed with Kalashnikovs, black walkie-talkies, or fake bomb detectors that look like a thin metal antennae, which is supposed to bend when it detects explosives, like a divining rod. (The two British businessmen who invented and sold the device are serving seven- and ten-year jail sentences in the U.K. for fraud, but the wands are still in use across the Middle East.)

The street was muted, devoid of its once-familiar hustle. There was a melancholy to it, reinforced by the emptiness and the many images of the dead or missing, as well as the banners strung across the street urging sacrifice for the nation. The dead were often portrayed alongside religious symbols, making clear their sect, like one poster declaring ten dead men in military fatigues “the righteous martyrs,” with a picture of the city’s Shiite Sayda Zeinab shrine in the background. The shrine has drawn Shiite fighters from across the Middle East, including Iraq and Lebanon, to defend it.

It was a crisp mid-morning on a Sunday, and the sound of prayers poured out of the open door of an Orthodox church. There, too, there was a banner reflecting loss. It hung from the house of worship, emblazoned with the bearded faces of the two missing bishops, presumed kidnapped in northern Syria in April. “For you, we pray,” it said in English and Arabic. There has been no claim of responsibility, no ransom demand, no proof of life. The bishops are among the thousands who have simply disappeared in this conflict, snatched by one side or the other, their whereabouts unknown, their fate uncertain.

Cardboard boxes of produce spilled out of a general store and onto the cobblestones. The small white zucchini were two hundred Syrian pounds per kilogram ($1.40); so, too, were the Lebanese cucumbers. An old man, hands blackened with grease, looked up from mending a diesel heater as a teen-age boy pushed a wooden cart piled with bananas past the old man’s tiny workshop.