Since Walaa Ali first fled her home in central Syria nearly a decade ago, she has crossed the country four times in search of safety for her family. Every time she settled in a new place, she spread the word about mate.
Every morning, Ms. Ali, 27, carefully sets out a gold-mirrored tray with a matching tea kettle, a sugar bowl that she fills with crushed ginger, her tea glass and a metal straw for her morning maté (pronounced MAH-teh) — the strong, bitter tea sourced from South America.
“I have been driven from one place to another, and everywhere I met neighbors and introduced them to Maté,” she said recently as she sipped from her cup filled with hot water and a generous portion of Maté leaves floating on top . “They know that if they come to Walaa’s house, they will drink mate.”
The drink, made from a leaf called yerba mate and hugely popular in countries such as Argentina and Brazil, has a large and fervent following in Syria, one that has grown in recent decades. Syrians have increasingly turned to the social and communal ritual surrounding its consumption, similar to a hookah shared with friends or family.
A cup of the grassy, caffeinated drink – often compared to Japanese green tea – can last for hours as it is refilled with hot water and drunk through a metal straw. The drink naturally fills the hours of the Syrian sahra, traditional Middle Eastern social gatherings that last late into the night or early morning hours.
The Syrians have made it their own and often drink mate from small glass cups rather than from the gourds commonly used in South America.
For more than a century, empire, migration, military conscription, and war have worked together to spread mate to every corner of Syria. The country’s conflict, which has displaced nearly seven million people internally since it began in 2011, has brought the country to more new palates.
About half of the population of northwest Syria consists of people who have fled their homes elsewhere in the country. Mrs. Ali and her husband are among them.
They and their four children live in an unfinished house in the town of Binnish, where residents say more than half of the 11,000 residents have been internally displaced by the war.
Ms Ali and her husband, Yaman al-Deeb, 30, estimate they have introduced mate to more than 100 people, including neighbors and colleagues.
Syrians were first introduced to mate when they emigrated to South America — paradoxically lured in part by the coffee industry there — as they sought economic opportunity in the waning decades of the Ottoman Empire, according to Naji Sulaiman, an assistant professor of environmental and applied botany. at the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Italy.
They settled in countries where mate was part of the social fabric. For Syrians, the social aspect of a drink that was meant to be shared – sometimes from the same cup and straw – and consumed over extended periods of time was appealing.
When some emigrants returned home after World War I, either for a visit or for good, they brought it back with them in bags full, introducing mate to more Syrians, Mr. Sulaiman said.
Ms. Ali said she grew up drinking it, and when she was in middle and high school, she woke up to find her father had prepared the tea for them to drink together.
She began her freshman year of college in 2012 when Syria’s anti-government Arab Spring uprising spiraled into civil war. The fighting stretched across towns, cities, fields and highways, and at times meant shipments were severely delayed and shelves emptied.
To ensure she never had to go without, Ms Ali carried a small pack of mate with her wherever she went.
“I would keep it as a backup so I wouldn’t get shut down,” she said. “The cup, the straw and the mate, they were always with me.”
In 2021, Syria was the world’s third-largest importer of mate, according to the Observatory of Economic Complexity, an online data platform that collects country-level trade data.
“Despite today’s tough economic times, people still want to drink mate – at work, in government offices. Even in the army, people drink mate,” Mr Sulaiman said, adding that it regularly appears in soap operas on Syrian television.
“It has become part of the Syrian identity,” he said.
Several Syrian companies now import yerba mate and market it in their own packaging. In the city of Idlib, in northwestern Syria, billboards for new mate products urge residents to ‘give it a try’.
On a recent evening in Idlib, friends, couples and families gathered on benches overlooking the road or on picnic blankets spread on sidewalks and among olive trees, transforming the roadside into a park. One of the cafes there started selling mate three years ago, after recently displaced Syrians started asking for it.
“But are they making it the right way?” said Ali al-Dlaati, 26, as he rolled out a picnic blanket and began setting up what he considered an ideal spread to complement mate: salty snacks, Syrian revolutionary music and friends.
“It has its rituals,” said Mr al-Dlaati, the manager of a local manufacturing company.
He went on to explain how to properly prepare and drink mate: the water should be hot, but not boiled, and when all the mate leaves have settled at the bottom of the glass – after several refills with hot water – the drink is finished.
Since fleeing to Idlib in 2017, he said, he has introduced the drink to friends and colleagues alike.
Beside them, Mustafa al-Jaafar, 23, a graphic designer, sipped from his metal straw. He said he started drinking mate last year after Mr al-Dlaati, a colleague, insisted he try it.
“And now I drink it all the time,” he said, as Mr al-Dlaati looked on approvingly.
“Mate is like smoking,” Mr al-Dlaati said. “Once you get hooked, you start doing it everywhere.”
Back in Binnish, Mr al-Deeb oversaw the meticulous preparation of mate while in a sahra in his neighbor’s apartment. In the distance came the faint sound of artillery from the front lines of a now largely stalled war.
“Most of the people who fled here drink it,” says the host, Aziz al-Asmar, an artist with a vibrant personality who paints murals in the area. “And when they come as a guest and you ask what they want to drink, they ask for mate. So we started drinking it too.”
Mr al-Asmar recalled how he came into contact with the drink in the 1990s while doing his mandatory military service. But he stopped drinking it when he left the army.
“When the revolution started and people started fleeing their homes, we started drinking it like before,” he said, watching a neighbor sit on his balcony across the street.
“Join me,” he shouted at him. “Come and drink mate.”
Mohammed Haj Kadour reporting contributed.