Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi

If you have walked into the National Museum of Damascus you have already seen this palace: the museum’s doorway is this building’s facade, dated 727. It was taken down stone by stone, carried to Damascus and rebuilt as the entrance. What is left of the palace stands out in the steppe between Homs and Palmyra. It was built for the Umayyad caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, and is the twin of Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, which he built a year later.

Getting there

About 100 km east of Homs and 75 km south-west of Palmyra, near al-Qaryatayn on the steppe road. There is no settlement in between, so go with a driver who knows the route. The site is unmarked and there is next to nothing in the way of entrance control.

What to see

The palace is quadrangular, with sides of 70 metres. Its walls were mudbrick on a masonry base; the mudbrick has gone back into the sand, and the stone base now traces where the walls stood. Three corners keep the remains of round towers. On the fourth stands a tower taken over from an older monastery. The palace stood two storeys high. Around it a reservoir, a bath and a khan can still be made out; the water came from the Harbaqa dam.

What not to miss

The tower on the fourth corner. It is the oldest part of the site and older than the palace itself: the Umayyad builders simply folded a monastery tower that was already standing into their plan. One corner shows how comfortable Umayyad architecture was about borrowing what it inherited.

The other half is in Damascus

This page is incomplete on its own. The gate facade, fragments of stucco wall, floor frescoes and the reliefs found in the 1936 excavation are all in the National Museum of Damascus. One relief shows a man in Sasanian dress, thought possibly to be Hisham himself. To see the palace properly you need both stops: the foundations in the steppe and the facade in Damascus.

History

An inscription over the entrance records that Hisham had it built in 727. It was never the caliph’s main residence; the flat steppe around it was for hunting and racing, and visiting noblemen stayed in tents outside the walls. The Ayyubids and Mamluks used the building in later centuries, and it was abandoned for good after the Mongol invasions.