Featured places
Mosques, caravanserais, souks, museums — and why they are worth the walk.
813 Places
Arwad Island
Three kilometres off Tartus, the only inhabited island in Syria. Its lanes are too narrow for cars, and wooden boats are still built here by hand in the yards.
Tartus · Phoenician — Crusader — present
Al-Zahiriyya Madrasa
The tomb of Sultan Baybars, north of the Umayyad Mosque. A gold mosaic band runs right around the burial chamber, reading as the mosque’s own work continued.
Damascus · Mamluk — late 13th century
Sayyida Ruqayya Mosque
North of the Umayyad Mosque, a Persian-built shrine set apart by its mirrored interior. It stands over the grave of a child who died in Damascus after Karbala.
Damascus · Modern building — older shrine
Saladin Castle
A Crusader–Ayyubid castle on a ridge between two ravines east of Latakia. A single stone needle still stands in the rock-cut ditch that carried its bridge.
Latakia · Byzantine — Crusader — Ayyubid
Our Lady of Saidnaya
A monastery standing on a mass of rock north of Damascus. It keeps an icon that draws Christian and Muslim visitors alike, in a small chapel off the main church.
Damascus · Byzantine foundation — later layers
Masyaf Castle
A castle set on the rock above the town, west of Hama. In the 12th century it was the Nizari Ismaili centre in Syria, and Sinan governed from here.
Hama · Medieval — Nizari Ismaili period
Church of Saint Simeon Stylites
Four basilicas built around the pillar where an ascetic lived for thirty-seven years, northwest of Aleppo — finished half a century before Hagia Sophia.
Aleppo · Byzantine — 5th century
Maaloula
A village pressed into the cliffs north of Damascus. One of the last places where Western Neo-Aramaic is spoken, with two monasteries and a gorge split in the rock.
Damascus · Early Christian — to the present
Maktab Anbar
A three-courtyard Damascene mansion of the 1800s in Qaymariyya. Built for a merchant, then the city’s first modern secondary school, now a cultural centre.
Damascus · Ottoman — 19th century
Qasr Ibn Wardan
A sixth-century Byzantine complex out in the steppe northeast of Hama. Its walls, banded in yellow brick and black basalt, have no parallel in the region.
Hama · Byzantine — 6th century
Khan al-Harir
An Ottoman caravanserai built for the silk trade inside the Aleppo souq. Damaged in the war, it is among the parts repaired and reopened with the market.
Aleppo · Ottoman
The Norias of Hama
Wooden wheels standing in the Orontes. They lift the river into the aqueducts, and the groan they make as they turn is taken as the sound of the city.
Hama · Maintained since the Mamluk period
