Dhakir: A Basalt Village of the Hauran

A basalt village on the eastern edge of the Lajat lava plateau, on the Damascus–Suwayda road. It is a good place to read the Hauran’s stone architecture in one go: doors and windows of stone, roofs of long basalt slabs, defensive towers, and channels bringing water from the valley. Carved blocks from an ancient temple have found their way into the walls of the houses.

Getting there

58 kilometres from Damascus, 42 from Suwayda and 25 from Shahba, at an altitude of about 730 metres. The village lies on the edge of Wadi al-Liwa and is reached from the main road. The 2004 census counted 519 people, mostly Druze, and the village has a Druze shrine, Maqam Shayth.

Who lived here

According to Arabic sources, Nabataeans lived here from the 1st century BC. A temple was built in the 2nd century AD and turned into a church in the Byzantine period. Sources disagree about whom the temple served. The Arabic source names Baalshamin, the Lord of the Heavens; the inscription published by the French epigraphers Sartre-Fauriat and Sartre gives no name at all, only the epithet holy.

What to see

The old houses are mostly two storeys, built around courtyards, with the staircase just behind the door. Doors and windows are stone slabs with one or two leaves. Two houses with colonnaded courtyards are especially good examples. The roofs are covered with long basalt slabs called rabd. South of the village is a large tomb from the early 2nd century AD, with an arch and burial niches inside; to the north are tombs cut into the rock. You can also see channels that carried the water of Wadi al-Liwa to the village pools, and wells filled by rainwater.

What not to miss

The walls of the houses. The archaeologist Jacqueline Dentzer-Feydy identified pieces of the temple inside today’s homes, among them a cornice fragment carved with an S-shaped vine. Adnan Bounni dates these pieces to the 2nd and 3rd centuries. Finds from around the temple include a female figure wearing Athena’s aegis, reliefs of a horse and an eagle, the torso of a Roman soldier in armour, and an inscribed block read as a centurion’s dedication.

What travellers wrote

Burckhardt recorded the village among the ruins of the Lajat in 1812. Wetzstein, the Prussian consul in Damascus, described in 1860 a fine temple ruin east of the valley and an abandoned mosque built of reused stone. Writing in the Revue Biblique in 1898, Séjourné noted a finely carved frieze and a large slab with three busts, their faces damaged.

Where it stands now

Dhakir is in Suwayda governorate, on the edge of the Lajat, and the governorate has been inside an armed conflict since July 2025. The present condition of the village cannot be confirmed from independent sources, and access to the region is not regular. This page tells you what Dhakir is; it does not tell you that you can go there today.