After several days in the major cities of Damascus and Aleppo, I had the chance to visit a number of sites near Aleppo and the Mediterranean coast with the help of a driver–doing this helped me to cover quite a bit of ground over the course of two days. It’s hard to do justice to these sites in just a few photos but here goes:
Church of St. Simeon–this is an amazingly well-preserved church from the 5th century AD, built in honor of Simeon Stylites, famous for (among other things) living on top of a pillar for decades. The church is built around the site of the pillar itself:
Ain Dara–the site of an Iron Age temple in the Neo-Hittite style and often cited as having parallels to the biblical description of Solomon’s temple:
Tell Mardikh (Ebla)–a huge 60 hectare site south of Aleppo, and location of a city that flourished in the 3rd millennium BC:
Ras Shamra (Ugarit)–site of an important Late Bronze Age city on the Mediterranean coast near modern Latakia, and of course the place of the discovery of the famous Ugaritic tablets. Considering my area of study, this was a site I could not miss (almost the single reason I came to Syria):
Ras Ibn Hani–a site neighboring Ras Shamra, where Ugaritic tablets were also discovered:
Qala’at Marqab–a stunning medieval castle made of black basalt, built in 1062 by the Muslims but subsequently reinforced and used by the Crusaders, before then falling to the Mamluk Sultan Qalawun:
As a final tidbit: in the course of all this walking and sightseeing, my old sneakers just totally fell apart on me (notice the detached sole), somewhere on the sandy slopes of Ebla. I had no choice but to buy a shiny new pair of shoes at Latakia:
