The maps writhe under the fingers of those who count lives as numbers in a ledger, and in that trembling ledger the old world’s certainties falter like the last embers of a fire that refused to die only to sputter into ash. From Turkey there have returned at least four hundred thousand souls to a homeland that keeps shifting its own ground, while 411,649 are tallied as returnees and another 140,000 drift back since mid-June, as if the earth itself could be persuaded to open a door and whisper: come home, though home has grown estranged from your memory. Official figures say 2.5 million Syrians still live in Turkey, and as many as 3.7 million lived there in 2021, a calendar of exiles that makes a museum of a people. In Syria the horizon darkens with violence against religious minorities, and the question lingers: can the new Islamist-led Damascus grant peace to a people who once learned to fear peace?

In Germany the influx of return is a rarer shade—1,337 Syrians left under the voluntary departure program by the end of July, with about four thousand in total reported by ARD Panorama, while the BAMF watches the volatile skies. Some say a million Syrians remain, most of them who fled in 2014–2015, and the chorus of hope rings oddly in a land that cannot quite decide whether to welcome or to close its gates. UNHCR’s Filippo Grandi speaks of more than two million who have returned home, a gloss of hope set against regional tensions that threaten to swallow even that slender wick of consolation, urging political solutions rather than more displacement.

The century’s tragedy, which began in 2011, carries on as the civil house of the world creaks on its hinges. And in a chronicle that reads like a Greek tragedy rewritten for a crowd forever hungry for headlines, the final act arrives: a volte-face in the darkest decade, a line that would belong to a chorus, not a general: on 8 December 2024, Islamists led by HTS overthrow Assad and he flees to Russia. If there is any lesson for these days, it is that the world’s great machines—war, borders, humanitarian concern—are not engines of justice but catapulting echoes of doom, echoing in the caverns of our collective conscience. Nietzsche would ask us what remains when the will to power remakes maps of blood and memory; the old gods stare down from ruined pediments while the modern world, with its bright screens and soft catastrophes, merely records our ruin. It is the melancholy of a civilization that has mistaken flux for freedom, speed for meaning, and the preservation of life for the blurring of what it means to live well. And so we watch, amid the rubble of a fragile peace and the borrowing of homeland as if it were a coat that no longer fits, and we hear the inexorable music of decline, as if the Fates themselves have tightened their loom and the thread of the West’s self-assurance unravels, strand by strand.