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On the terrace of the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, the owner's widow, Roubina Tashjian, sorted through old photographs of its happier past in a more peaceful Syria.

Founded by an Armenian family in 1911, the Baron played host to adventurers, writers, kings, aviators, Bedouin chiefs and presidents until war forced it to close five years ago, reports Reuters.

Tashjian sees the Baron as part of a Syria that values religious and ethnic diversity, openness to the outside world, culture and respect for the country's great antiquities.

Trying to revive that vision of Syria amid a war that has aggravated social fractures would involve reconciliation between political opponents, religious sects and economic classes.

But with hundreds of thousands dead, more than half the country's pre-war population displaced and fighting ongoing, there seems little hope of that for now.

For the Baron, whose business depended on stability, safety and the draw of Syria's cultural treasures, the 2011 uprising was a catastrophic assault on everything that allowed it to thrive.

The Baron, in west Aleppo near the front line, was hit by mortar bombs, including one that sprayed shrapnel across an upper floor and another that crashed through the window of its "Oriental Room" onto delicate floor tiles but failed to explode.

During the fighting, the hotel took in refugee families from east Aleppo. While they were there they used so much water cleaning the floors of their rooms each morning that the elegant geometric tiles were damaged, Tashjian said.

In the late afternoon heat, the hotel is cooled by a breeze that drifts in through broken windows on the ground floor and up the grand staircase.

"Syria was the most comfortable, the most secular country in the Arab world," said Tashjian. "It was embarrassing if people asked if you were a Christian or a Muslim."