Places

Once entirely disconnected from the outside world due to its remote location and lack of roads, this site is now accessible by a sealed route right up to the castle entrance. The location, however, remains beautifully poised on its ridge at a point where three ravines meet in largely untamed and forested country. كانت هذه […]

Visitors to Apamea often don’t spare the time to visit the prominent remains of the largely Ayyubid (late eleventh century onwards) fortifications lying above the modern town of Qalaat Mudiq. This is virtually the last remaining fortified site in Syria where the villagers still live within the castle walls, though most of the town these […]

Built to protect the Crusader route between Tortosa (Tartus and Tripoli (to the south, in modern Lebanon) from attack originating in the Muslim interior through the Homs Gap, Areimeh was built before 1149 and after 1177 entrusted to the  Templars based in Tartus. The castle is divided between three enclosures separated by rock-cut ditches or […]

This site once housed a Byzantine fort (Argyrokastron) during the tenth/eleventh century Byzantine re-occupation of the Syrian coast. Later in the eleventh century it became an Arab fortification (hence the modern name, referring to a traditional southern Arabian tribal grouping, the Bani Qahtan). Initially taken by Tancred in the opening years of the Crusader period […]