Places

How did European and other visitors first build up their picture of ancient and medieval Damascus? Damascus attracted fewer long-term European residents than Aleppo, particularly due to its lower level of commercial exchanges with the West. The first short-term visitors were driven by a desire to fill out the picture in which events of the […]

It is impossible to summarise in a few words the beauty and significance of this building. Few other structures from the ancient world speak so eloquently of the many phases of their history—its beginnings as the temple of the early Roman period dedicated to Jupiter (as successor to the Semitic deity, Hadad, god of the […]

Only recently liberated from centuries of use as a fort and a prison, the Damascus Citadel is still relatively unknown from an internal perspective. Outside, the south face is obscured by the long shopping street, the Suq al-Hamidiye, but the external walls to the west, north and partly on the east offer a walking circuit […]

This itinerary takes you through the busy commercial heart of the old city of Damascus. The streets are still lined with the great khans of the trading enterprises of the Mamluk and Ottoman periods as well as with important tombs, madrases and mosques—illustrating the close association over the centuries between trade and faith under Islam. […]

Straight Street must be one of the best-known thoroughfares in the world, famed as the ‘Street Called Straight’ of the New Testament and its account of St Paul’s eventful sojourn in Damascus. Along its 1.5 km length, so much history unfolds before your eyes that it is difficult to take it all in. This itinerary […]

This itinerary covers the areas immediately outside the southwest corner of the city walls. The street called al-Sinaniye leads from the mosque of that name towards the southwest where it touches on  the Midan Quarter (see separate itinerary), skirting the historic Cemetery of Bab al-Saghir, said to contains several burials of significance in early Islam. […]