Syria’s lost cities
Syria is dotted with ghost cities, prosperous settlements that were mysteriously abandoned. Voyager visits their remains
WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHY KEVIN RUSHBY
WE ARE IN THE CAR heading north from Damascus and Adnan al-Hamwi, my guide, is warming to a favourite subject of his: first names. “Michael, for example, is from the Aramaic language: Mika El – the mercy of El, an old Biblical god.”
“I doubt most British people know the meaning of their name,” I say, “They are usually just sounds to us.”
Adnan laughs. “Come to Syria and learn the meaning of your name! Names are important. Take Esther – it’s from Ishtar, the ancient fertility goddess of Persia. Even Kevin, your own name, that’s an ancient Persian thunder god.” I grin. The name Kevin never sounded so good.
Syria has a habit of coming up with the unexpected, and an explanation for it. Human culture has been making marks here for so long, marks made on top of what went before, that origins and causes can stand out where previously there was only mystery. Take the humble towel: as we motor through the town of Hama, Adnan insists on a detour to a friend’s workshop where a creaking old handloom is turning them out.
“The fluffy absorbent towel was invented here,” explains Abdulmuizz, the owner, “By the 13th century we were producing 75,000 per year. Why? Because we had soap and bathing was becoming popular. Why did we have soap? Because we had olives and we had olives because the climate was right and the Byzantine Empire needed oil.” The loom creaks and rattles. “In those days, like now,” he adds, “oil was big money.”
An hour later I begin to understand why Adnan took me to meet a towel-maker. On a high rolling plateau of jagged limestone outcrops interspersed with tiny rocky fields, we come to one of Syria’s great mysteries: the Dead Cities. This particular place is called Serjilla, but there are more than 700 other similar sites – all ruined settlements that were abandoned between the fifth and eighth centuries.
Serjilla, an hour’s drive south of Aleppo, is one of the best-preserved sites dotted across what is, at first glance, an impossibly inhospitable landscape. What is remarkable is that this landscape could produce such a place: colonnaded villas and public buildings, in fact every sign of prosperity and success. The answer is found at the side of each magnificent house: huge stone presses for oil and wine lying in the grass as if their owners had just stepped away. This is what made Serjilla and the other Dead Cities rich, supplying olive oil and wine to Rome and then Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul, then the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire).
I wander through the grand old villas, admiring the bold Hellenistic architecture with its rich red stone. Here are the town baths where those towels from Hama would have been used. The late sun rakes across pitted walls, revealing ornamental crosses and ancient inscriptions. Serjilla is an eerie and magical place, especially late in the day when there are no other foreign visitors, just a couple of local families enjoying picnics and football matches, eighth-century columns doubling up as goal posts.
Adnan, a respected historian, admitted that there is no proven explanation of why these cities were abandoned. “Maybe the economics changed: olive oil prices fell. Maybe earthquakes discouraged them. The truth is, we don’t know – it is a mystery.”
Several of the Dead Cities have been dug by archaeologists and are laid out for visitors with signs and information. Others lie within modern villages: strange stone towers sprouting from gardens, fragments of carved lintels lying under the pistachio trees. These places offer an incredible sense of discovery. At one place, Qatura, we stepped through a sheep pen to reach a tomb entrance carved into the rock beneath a family house. Inside the entrance vestibule there were traces of Greek inscriptions and, beyond, a darkened sepulchre with stone benches where sacks of fertiliser are stored.
After spending the night in Aleppo at one of the boutique hotels of the Jdeida quarter, we drive out to see the Dead Cities that lie to the north, close to the Turkish border. At Ain Dara, we climb a low hill overlooking the valley of Afrin where vast pomegranate and pistachio orchards spread all around. On the summit are the ruins of an Iron Age temple dating back to 1200 BC: two large enclosures, one surrounded by carved basalt figures of mythical lions.
“The dead would be brought here to the first room,” explains Adnan, “And the lions would judge them and decide if they could pass to the second room – heaven.”
We walk back down the hill and set off for the region’s most famous historical site, the shrine of St Simeon Stylites. The vast ruined church, the most ambitious structure on earth in the late fifth century, contains the stump of the pillar where St Simeon supposedly spent the last 36 years of his life until his death in AD 459. He was said to eat once a week, frugally of course, and suffer from an ulcer on his leg – a punishment for self-righteousness.
“The locals say he never spoke to a woman in his life, not even his mother,” Adnan explains, adding, “I don’t believe it myself.”
Simeon’s attempt to withdraw from the world up a 18-metre pillar had one major effect. People flocked to see him. And when he died there was no respite: his body became a pawn in a power game between Byzantium and its distant, heresy-prone, province. Soldiers came and kidnapped the saintly corpse, carrying it off to Antioch and later Istanbul. The church was abandoned in the 12th century and is now an atmospheric ruin where the wind moans in the pine trees and courting couples explore the further-flung ruins. To the north are magnificent views of the Amanus Mountains of Turkey.
The next day being Sunday I decide to tour Aleppo’s holy places and see for myself some of the country’s famed religious diversity. First is the Armenian Cathedral of the Forty Martyrs, where a grand spectacle of theatre is in progress for a rather small congregation. Under the watchful gaze of a large icon representing Judgement Day, the priests chant and counter-chant across the nave. Robes are donned and changed. Incense is swung. Holy texts uncovered and recovered. The Armenian church’s rites date back to the fourth century and this is a glimpse of Byzantium in its glorious heyday.
The Maronite, Syriac and Latin churches pass less memorably and I slip away to eat fata’ir, tiny cheese pastries, from a street stall. Finally I visit the Shi’ite shrine of Mashhad al-Hussein, where the severed head of Hussain, the prophet Muhammad’s grandson, is supposed to have been brought after his martyrdom in 680. Pilgrims are praying, tapping their foreheads on tiny tablets of baked earth from Karbala in Iraq, scene of the martyrdom. Behind an ornate screen hung with green banners is the small stone on which the holy head rested for a night, leaving a bloody trace of its passage to Damascus.
One of the men praying finishes and steps outside with me. His face is stern and unsmiling. Here at last, I think, the friendly cultural mingling ends: I’m going to get an evangelical tirade. But instead he hands me one of the small clay tablets of Karbala clay: “Something to remember this place by.”
We chat about football and far away, over the city, the sound of church bells can be heard mingling with the cry of the muezzin at the Great Mosque.
