Jayrud

A town northeast of Damascus, in the fertile Jayrud plain at the foot of the Qalamoun mountains. The 2004 census counted 24 thousand people, and 32 thousand with the surrounding nahiya. What matters about the town is not its size but where it stands: on the road between Damascus and Palmyra, at the eastern gate of the Qalamoun.

Getting there

Northeast out of Damascus, past Dumayr. Jayrud was the station after Dumayr on the Roman road, and the order still works that way. The desert road branches off here; fill up on fuel and water before you leave the town.

How long it takes

An hour. That covers the centre, the market and the edge of the salt flat to the west. Treated as a break on the Palmyra road, half an hour does it.

A station on the Roman road

In Roman times the place was called Geroda. It appears in the Antonine Itinerary, written under Diocletian, as one of the stations on the Palmyra to Damascus road, 16 Roman miles from Telsea — today’s Dumayr. Yaqut al-Hamawi came through in the early 13th century, under the Ayyubids, and recorded it as a village in the Ghouta of Damascus belonging to Maaloula. Under the Ottomans it was the centre of the Jayrud nahiya, with a pasha and an agha living here: Muhammad al-Da’as al-Jayrudi Pasha and Salim al-Da’as Agha.

What is there

Excavation produced Natufian microliths, blades and scrapers; settlement here goes back past the beginning of farming. Travellers of the 19th century found the town well off, hospitable and unusually clean. The same accounts record how often the bedouin tribes living at the edge of the desert raided it. Jayrud today is known for wheat and barley.

What most people miss

The salt flat. West of the town lies a wide salt pan called al-Mallaha, where the plain ends and the desert starts, and in the dry months its surface is white. Water and salt in one place is what explains why Jayrud stands exactly here, and looking out over that plain you can see it.