A City of Intrigue
From Our Own Correspondent
BBC
4.4 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 11 January 2014
⏱️ 28 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A secret city, melted cheese, female freedom fighters, buried treasure, an emperor's magnificent lifestyle, songs by the camp fire, Kalashnikovs and puppies, Kazakh carpenters and Tajik tilers
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Hello, today a secret Syrian city, a place of plotting and the intrigue, and it's not in Syria. |
| 0:19.4 | There's a new security sweep ahead of the Winter Olympics in Sochi, but are they picking up the wrong people? |
| 0:25.6 | Two men called Marco take us underground to learn more about a perfect world dreamed up by a Roman |
| 0:31.8 | Emperor. And it's been dismissed as a Taj Mahal of |
| 0:35.5 | moronic madness, but an Indian holy man insists he knows where a thousand |
| 0:40.9 | tons of gold are buried. |
| 0:43.8 | Syria's opposition National Coalition says it hasn't yet decided |
| 0:48.1 | whether it will attend the so-called Geneva 2 peace conference |
| 0:51.5 | later this month. |
| 0:53.2 | It'll face pressure to be there at a meeting in Paris tomorrow of the so-called |
| 0:56.8 | Friends of Syria, a grouping of countries which backs the uprising against President |
| 1:01.4 | Basha al-Assad. |
| 1:03.4 | But ahead of Geneva too, talks about the future of Syria, some more secretive than others, are already |
| 1:09.4 | going on in a variety of locations. |
| 1:12.1 | Tim Hules, just back from one such place in Turkey. |
| 1:15.0 | The two stickiest things I encountered in Gaziantep fall into opposite categories. |
| 1:21.0 | Delicious and disgusting. |
| 1:23.0 | One, I couldn't get out of my teeth, the other off my boots. |
| 1:27.0 | The first was cheese, brilliantly white, sweet cheese. |
| 1:32.0 | The second was brown slime. I'll tell you about the cheese first in |
| 1:36.8 | the hope that you'll keep listening. It's melted cheese bound up in the finest |
| 1:41.7 | threads of pastry, saturated in syrup and rose water, |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.

