Sadad: A Syriac Christian Town on the Desert Edge

A town 60 km south of Homs and 101 km northeast of Damascus, at the eastern end of the Qalamoun mountains where the desert begins. Most of its people belong to the Syriac Orthodox Church; the 2004 census counted 3503 residents. The reason to come is the churches: Mar Sarkis and Mar Todros have old frescoes on their walls, and wall paintings are rare in Syrian churches. The town’s past is worth the trip too — a desert town where Aramaic was spoken until the 1830s and where the Bedouin came to shop.

Where Sadad is and how to get there

It lies 18 km east of Hasya, on the Homs–Damascus road. You need a car; ask in Homs before setting out whether any public transport runs. Maaloula, on the same Qalamoun line, is 53 km to the south.

How long it takes

Two hours. The churches are inside the town, and you walk between them.

What is there

The town has several old churches. Mar Todros (Saint Theodore) is dated to the 12th century and Mar Sarkis (Saint Sergius) to the 18th century; Mar Bahos (Saint Bacchus) is another. The frescoes are in Mar Sarkis and Mar Todros. From 21 to 28 October 2013 the town was held by the Nusra Front; 45 Christians were killed in that week and the churches were looted. An attack by ISIS in 2015 was pushed back. In the years that followed, the hospital, power and water networks were rebuilt. Ask locally about the state of the frescoes and whether a church is open.

Aramaic and the biblical Zedad

Sadad is thought to be Zedad, named in Numbers 34:8 and Ezekiel 47:15 as the northeastern border of Canaan. The town’s mother tongue was a Western Aramaic dialect close to that of Maaloula, until Arabic replaced it in the 1830s. Today some people speak Aramaic as a second language, and traces of it remain in the local Arabic — a study published in 2010 looked at them. The churches run free Syriac classes. Sadad was once the seat of a bishop, and according to the Maronite historian al-Duwayhi, some monks of the Deir Mar Musa monastery came from the town.

A market town for the Bedouin

A French report from 1881 describes how the town ringed itself and its gardens with adobe barricades against Bedouin raids: a rider could only get in by dismounting. In the 1980s an anthropologist described Sadad as the most important market town for the Bedouin of the region. Most working people were weavers, making abayas (long robes) and woollen mats to sell to the Bedouin, who also came here for tent gear, saddles, coffee and tea. The Hamdanid prince and poet Abu Firas al-Hamdani is buried in Sadad.

What most people miss

Some of Sadad’s stones are no longer in Sadad. Carved pediments from the town, inscribed in Syriac, are in the National Museum of Damascus. After a visit here, a stop at the museum in Damascus shows the script these churches were once decorated with.