Qinnasrin, Ancient Chalcis near Aleppo

An ancient city on the Queiq river, 25 kilometres south-west of Aleppo. The Greeks called it Chalcis; its Syriac name, Qenneshrin, means nest of eagles, and the Arabic Qinnasrin comes from that. It was founded in the Hellenistic period, stood on Byzantium’s desert frontier and in the early Islamic centuries was the military and administrative centre of northern Syria. Between 963 and 1030 it was destroyed again and again. It ended as a village. Bab Qinnasrin, one of the gates in Aleppo’s walls, is named after the road that led here.

Where the city stood

There is no firm answer. That shapes any visit. Some scholars place the ruins of Islamic Qinnasrin at al-Hadir, east of the Queiq, and Hellenistic Chalcis at the village of al-Iss, west of the river. Others think the city stood at al-Iss the whole time, from the Hellenistic period to the Ayyubids — the Kurdish dynasty of Saladin. The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago has excavated the mound at al-Hadir. Because the location is disputed, this page carries no map pin.

Getting there

South-west from Aleppo, to the villages of al-Hadir and al-Iss. The sources name no standing monument here; what you visit is a mound and two villages. We found no verified information on the current state of the road or the site. Check with a local driver before you set out; there is no public transport information.

From the Seleucids to Rome

According to the historian Appian, the city was founded by Seleucus I Nicator and named after Chalcis on Euboea. There was another Chalcis in Lebanon, at today’s Anjar. The two were told apart by their rivers: this one stood on the Belus, today’s Queiq. In AD 92 the city took the title Flavia in honour of the emperor Domitian.

On the Byzantine frontier

Qinnasrin was a bishopric from early on and later became an independent archbishopric. It was a caravan stop and also part of the defensive line holding the desert frontier. In 540 the Sasanian shah Khosrau I appeared outside the walls and took 200 pounds of gold in return for sparing the city. Justinian then had the walls rebuilt, work carried out around 550 by Isidore the Younger. The Sasanians took the city in 608/9 and held it until the war ended in 628.

The Jund Qinnasrin

The Arabs took the city in 636/7 after brief resistance, and Khalid ibn al-Walid made his home here. The Umayyad caliph Yazid I had its walls pulled down. Qinnasrin was made the centre of the Jund Qinnasrin, one of the military districts of Islamic Syria, and for a long time Aleppo lay within that district. In 943 it was counted among the best-built cities of northern Syria, though by then it had lost first place in the district to nearby Aleppo.

Destruction

In 945 Sayf al-Dawla, the Hamdanid emir of Aleppo, was defeated here by the Ikhshidids of Egypt. In 963, on news of a Byzantine attack, the people left. They came back. In 966 Sayf al-Dawla fell back before the emperor Nikephoros II Phokas and evacuated the city; the Byzantines burned its mosques. Some of the inhabitants settled east of the Euphrates, others in Aleppo.

Within a few years the city filled again, but the Byzantines destroyed it in 998, and the rebuilt city was sacked once more in 1030. When the Persian traveller Nasir Khusraw passed through in 1047 he found a poor village. Towards the end of the 11th century Sulayman ibn Qutalmish, the Seljuq ruler of Anatolia, rebuilt it, and his rival Tutush I destroyed it. In 1119 the Artuqid emir Ilghazi turned it into an arms depot and raided the surrounding country from here. In Ottoman times the area was known as Eski Haleb, Old Aleppo.

Don’t miss

Bab Qinnasrin, on your way back into Aleppo. Little of the city itself may be standing, but its name lives on in the gate of Aleppo’s old city, and the road out of that gate once came straight here.