Featured places
Mosques, caravanserais, souks, museums — and why they are worth the walk.
813 Places
The Ain Dara Temple
An Iron Age temple on a mound above the Afrin valley: giant footprints carved into the entrance paving, basalt lions, and the facade destroyed in 2018.
Aleppo · Late Bronze — Iron Age (Hittite — Aramaean)
The Ain al-Fijah Spring
Damascus drinks from here. The spring that bursts out of the rock in Wadi Barada, the orchards around it, and the state of the plant that was hit in 2016.
Damascus · Roman — present
The Roman Theatre at Palmyra
Beside the colonnaded street, a bank of seating 92 metres across. Cavea and orchestra survive, the stage front fell in 2017, and repair work has begun.
Palmyra · Roman
The Cathedral of Our Lady of Tortosa
The best-preserved Crusader church in Syria, now the Tartus Museum. A three-aisled interior, finds from Amrit and Ugarit, Roman sarcophagi in the garden.
Tartus · Crusader — Mamluk
The National Museum of Damascus
The Ugaritic alphabet, the Dura-Europos synagogue and Palmyrene funerary reliefs. Founded in 1919, closed in 2012, four of its five wings reopened in 2018.
Damascus · Modern building with an Umayyad facade
The Sinan Pasha Mosque
The green-tiled minaret is the one in Damascus you can name from streets away. Sinan Pasha built the mosque in 1590, in the market lanes outside Bab al-Jabiya.
Damascus · Ottoman
The Al-Shibani Church and Cultural Centre
A church of the 12th century, a Franciscan college from 1859, then a tobacco store. Repaired by 2006, it is now the cultural centre of Aleppo’s old city.
Aleppo · Medieval — Ottoman
Serjilla
The best preserved of Syria’s Dead Cities: a bath house, an andron and two-storey stone houses, roofless but standing. Built around 473, empty by the 7th century.
Idlib · Byzantine — 5th to 6th century
The National Museum of Latakia
A museum since 1986 in a 16th-century Ottoman khan facing the port. Finds from Ugarit and Ebla inside; a two-tier arcade and statues in the courtyard.
Latakia · Ottoman khan — museum
The Church of Qalb Lozeh
A basilica built around 460. The two towers of its west front, with a wide arch between them, are the earliest known version of the Romanesque facade.
Idlib · Byzantine — 5th century
Chastel Rouge
A small Crusader castle standing in a village 12 km southeast of Tartus. A single keep inside a rectangular curtain wall — the plainest form the type takes.
Tartus · Crusader — Mamluk
Qalaat Najm
An Ayyubid castle on the bank of the Euphrates, 30 km east of Manbij. Inside are a palace with its bathhouse and a rare mosque arcaded towards the river.
Aleppo · Zengid — Ayyubid
