Featured places
Mosques, caravanserais, souks, museums — and why they are worth the walk.
813 Places
The Temple of Hosn Suleiman
A Roman sanctuary in the coastal mountains at 950 metres, built of colossal blocks. A four-gated enclosure wall, an eagle relief, and decrees cut into the stone.
Tartus · Roman
The Great Mosque of al-Nuri, Homs
A sun temple, then the Church of St John, then a mosque. Inside the souq: a portal banded in black basalt and white stone, a basalt minaret, reused Roman columns.
Homs · Roman temple — church — Zangid mosque
The Hejaz Railway Station
The Damascus end of the line to Medina. The passenger hall, with its carved wooden ceiling and coloured glass, opened in 1913; no train has run since 1917.
Damascus · Ottoman
Hammam Yalbugha al-Nasiri
A Mamluk bathhouse of 1491 at the west end of the citadel square: a façade banded in black and yellow stone, a yellow dome, an interior repaired in 1985.
Aleppo · Mamluk
The al-Nuri Mosque, Hama
A Zangid mosque on the Orontes, a short walk from the norias. A square minaret banded in black and white stone, a dated portal inscription, a wooden minbar.
Hama · Zangid
The National Museum of Aleppo
Founded in 1931, it holds what the north of Syria has yielded: the tablets of Mari, halls for Ugarit and Ebla, and the Tell Halaf basalt figures at the door.
Aleppo · Modern
The Halawiyah Madrasa
Facing the west gate of the Great Mosque of Aleppo, built over the city’s 5th-century cathedral — whose Byzantine capitals still stand in the prayer hall.
Aleppo · Byzantine — Zangid
Al-Bara
The largest of the Dead Cities. Two pyramid-roofed tombs, churches and olive presses on an industrial scale, with a working village standing inside the ruins.
Idlib · Byzantine — 4th to 6th century
Ebla
A tell 55 km southwest of Aleppo. The burnt archive of Palace G gave up thousands of cuneiform tablets from the 3rd millennium BC, now in Aleppo and Idlib.
Idlib · Early Bronze Age
The Darwish Pasha Mosque
An Ottoman mosque of 1574 at the west end of Straight Street. The Iznik tile panels around its doorway can be read from the pavement, without going in.
Damascus · Ottoman
The Roman Theatre of Jableh
A Roman theatre 90 metres across in the middle of Jableh, 25 km south of Latakia. Its 35 rows of seating are carried on arched vaults, not on a hillside.
Latakia · Roman — Crusader castle
The Great Colonnade at Palmyra
The spine of Palmyra: 1100 metres of columns raised in three phases. What the brackets were for, where the tetrapylon stood, and how long the walk takes.
Palmyra · Roman
