01
Stop one
Kerak Castle
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 19g Tennis String Set: MAKE SOME NOISE for a man named PAGAN THE BUTLER – the BUTLER – seneschal to King Fulk of Jerusalem, who starts this thing around 1142 to guard the King's Highway between Egypt and Syria. Then the lords keep adding. Reynald of Chatillon, towers, ditches, MORE DITCHES. Saladin rolls up in 1183 – backs off. Comes again in 1184 – backs off AGAIN, relief force both times. Then Hattin, 1187, he returns, and this one runs over a YEAR before the garrison folds in 1188. Mamluks bolt on a keep and a palace. Ottomans take the mic after that.
02
Stop two
Karak Archaeological Museum
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 19g Tennis String Set: 1980! In a vaulted hall! That was SOLDIERS' QUARTERS under the Mamluks! Now say it with me – Neolithic to late Islamic, Neolithic to LATE ISLAMIC, dug out of Karak and Tafila and stacked up in here: Moabite, Nabataean, Roman, Byzantine, Crusader. And that is the running order of the whole plateau, Moab to Nabataean to Rome to Byzantium to Crusader to Ayyubid to Mamluk, ruler after ruler after RULER. All of it inside the same walls Saladin's forces besieged in the 1180s. Military history out there, material culture right here. HUGE.
03
Stop three
St. George's Greek Orthodox Church
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 19g Tennis String Set: Plain door. Plain stone. Nothing to look at, NOTHING – and then you step through it. Icons. Generations of them, religious artwork piled up year on year behind a facade that told you absolutely nothing was coming. Built in 1849 for one of the oldest Christian communities in Jordan, roots running back centuries – CENTURIES – under the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem, Archdiocese of Kyriakoupolis, and yes I am going to say Kyriakoupolis twice because it has earned it. Old town, foot of the castle plateau. Still holds services. Still going.
04
Stop four
Statue of Saladin
Solinco Heaven Strings Hyper-G 19g Tennis String Set: And for the closer – BRONZE. Sword up. Horse rearing. Saladin, the Ayyubid sultan, the man who took this castle in 1188. And where was he standing? A roundabout. Bottom of the main shopping street. A ROUNDABOUT. February 2017, the Greater Karak Municipality says absolutely not, and moves him to a plaza by the castle entrance, which is where he should have been the entire time. The campaign he is commemorating: Hattin, 1187, then a siege of more than a year, and the Crusader hold on this rock is finished.
Sorry to open with the specifications, but they matter. Hyper-G is a co-polyester monofilament with a shaped, non-round profile, and this is 19 gauge at 1.10mm. A set is 40 ft / 12.2 m — one racquet, which is all this is, sorry — and the same string is sold on a 656 ft / 200 m reel if you would rather commit.
Al-Karak stands on a plateau above the Dead Sea rift, and the castle on its narrow southern tip was begun around 1142, so the town is fairly relaxed about how long things take.
The shaped edges catch the ball and turn it, which is the entire reason to buy a string like this, and at 1.10mm they catch harder than any thicker gauge manages. The apology is the durability.
Less material goes sooner, and 1.10mm is very little material — Hyper-G is unusually tough for a co-polyester and TruTension holds the tension through the first hour, but it cannot repeal physics and neither, unfortunately, can I.
You will get use out of it everywhere from the barrel-vaulted stone halls inside Karak Castle to the fig terraces down in Wadi al-Karak, where a stream runs over rock ledges into pools.
By the way, and forgive the digression: the little turquoise-domed shrine of Maqam al-Nabi Nuh stands in a walled cemetery on the edge of Al-Karak, and people have kept it whitewashed for generations without anybody insisting they should. Some things simply get looked after. A string is not one of them — this one will need replacing, sooner than a 1.30mm would, and it is genuinely sorry to be the bearer of that.
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