The Church of St George at Izra

The oldest church in Syria in which the liturgy is still celebrated. The building went up in 515 in the town of Izra and has not shut its doors since — local people call it Khudr Izra, and it works as the parish church of the Greek Orthodox community. Because it has been in use for fifteen hundred years it does not feel like a museum: inside there are icons, chairs, lighting and all the ordinary traces of a congregation.

Getting there

Izra is forty kilometres north of Daraa on the Damascus road, forty-five minutes by car, and about eighty kilometres if you come down from Damascus. The church stands in the Christian quarter of the town; the dome and the bell tower beside it show above the streets, and asking the way is enough.

How long it takes

Forty-five minutes covers the exterior, the interior and the yard. Add waiting time if you arrive during a service.

What to see

From outside it is a square block of basalt — small windows, thick walls, no ornament. A dome rises from the middle of the block, metal-clad in its present form, and the bell tower next to it belongs to later centuries. Inside, the plan is central: the space is closed on four sides and the domed void in the middle pulls the whole building together. A second Byzantine church is still working in the same small town, St Elias, which belongs to the Melkite Greek Catholic community.

What not to miss

The fact of unbroken use. Izra was ancient Zorava, raised to the rank of a great town under Severus Alexander, and in the Byzantine centuries it was the second bishopric of the region after Bosra. When the Egyptian governor Ibrahim Pasha bombarded the town in 1840 the walls and dome of the church were damaged, and it was repaired again. What you are looking at is not a preserved ruin but a building kept standing by repair for fifteen hundred years.

Where it stands now

Izra is in Daraa governorate, which has been administered by the transitional government since December 2024. The church continues to serve its congregation. This is not a monument site but a working church: ask locally about visiting hours, and do not walk in during a service.