Monuments of Syria أوابد سورية
A Window on Syria's Past by Ross Burns
This small site east of the great Church of St Simeon includes the considerably ruined Church of St Phocas (491–492), once one of the largest in the Jebel Semaan area of the northern Limestone Massif. The church. probably constructed not long after St Simeon’s Church as it imitates some aspects of its style, was turned […]
This superbly situated site looks down over the route joining Aleppo to Antioch via the Bab al-Hawa crossing. In the distance lie several sites of equal interest. Most notable of the remains is the Temple dedicated to Zeus Bomos, ‘Zeus of the Altar’, but down the slopes to the northeast lie remains of an extensive […]
Legendary ‘caravan city’ of Rome’s Eastern trade (the ‘Silk Route’) Palmyra was known for many centuries to European audiences as simply a place of legend. The first European expedition to explore its ruins confirmed at the end of the seventeenth century that the legends were true and that much of what had been a prosperous […]
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As the Monuments of Syria website expands, I hope to cover all the 130 or so sites covered in the book with pictures to illustrate the entries. This will be supplemented with some short thematic pages intended to give coverage to regional issues or themes. This page provides a map to illustrate the Ismaeli presence […]
Like many of the sites later fortified during the Crusades, this defensive outpost began as a Byzantine fort. Under the Crusades it was a dependency of the Lord of Saone (now the Castle of Saladin) but fell to Saladin in 1188. كانت هذه القلعة حصناً دفاعياً متقدماً للبيزنطيين، وفيما بعد أثناء الحروب الصليبية كانت تابعة […]
This relatively small castle of the Crusader era had an unusual history — it was ‘traded’, i. e. sold to the Ismaelis by the Crusaders in the 1180s. The site was probably originally a Byzantine fortified position surveying the deep gorge of the Nahr Jobar. The castle is discussed on page 238 of Monuments of […]
