Qalaat al-Riba (Riba Castle), Salamiyah

Qalaat al-Riba stands on a hill beside the village of al-Riba, among basalt hills 12 kilometres north of Salamiyah. It is a semicircular fortification more than 100 metres across, rising about 100 metres above the plain to the west. Who built it, and when, is still an open question.

How to get there

The road runs from Salamiyah to the village of al-Riba. A car can get close to the walls, and the climb is not hard. The village was founded in the mid-19th century on the ruins of a Byzantine town, and those ruins can still be seen. The castle and the land around it belong to the state.

What to see

A glacis, a sloping stone facing, wraps the hill on every side. It is built of basalt blocks taken from the same hill and barely worked, and most are more than 70 centimetres on a side. No mortar holds them. The builders fitted the natural bumps of the stones into one another. The only entrance is on the west and is about 2 metres wide. Traces of the old road that led inside are still there. Inside, two raised areas stand to the north-west and south-east, and the road joins them.

Castle or settlement

The dating is disputed. The researcher Mahmoud al-Amin assigns the structure to the Hellenistic period. Other researchers compare its fortification technique to the settlement walls of the Middle Bronze Age. Pottery collected on the surface runs from the second millennium BC into the Islamic periods. The eastern and south-eastern slopes hold a large number of tombs, most of them Roman or older. So the most likely view is that this was not a purely military castle but an old civilian settlement fortified later for protection. No systematic excavation has been carried out.

Do not miss

Walk round to the eastern slope. One of the quarries that supplied blocks for the wall can still be made out there. It is the clearest sign that the castle was cut from its own hill.