Damascus

Founded in 1919, the National Museum is Syria's oldest cultural institution, and its collection runs from prehistoric tools to Islamic manuscripts. Visitors enter through the reconstructed gateway of Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi, an Umayyad desert palace of 727 that was moved stone by stone from the steppe west of Palmyra. Inside are clay tablets from Ugarit, including one inscribed with an early alphabet of thirty signs, and the reconstructed synagogue of Dura-Europos, a mid-third-century room whose walls are covered in painted biblical scenes, one of the most remarkable survivals of ancient Jewish art anywhere.

The museum closed in 2012, when more than 300,000 objects were hidden for safekeeping, and reopened most of its wings in 2018. It closed again briefly after the change of government in December 2024 and reopened in January 2025. In November 2025 six small Roman-era marble statues were stolen from the classical department, prompting an investigation and a temporary closure; check current opening before planning anything around it.

Next door to the museum, this Ottoman complex was commissioned by Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent in the 1550s and designed by his chief architect, Mimar Sinan, whose work also fills Istanbul. Its mosque, with two slender pencil minarets and striped black and white stone, faces a courtyard with a long pool, once a hostel for pilgrims setting out on the long caravan route to Mecca. The adjoining madrasa, around a smaller garden court, has for decades housed craft workshops selling inlaid wood, brass and textiles.

The Old City's main covered market runs east from the citadel for about half a kilometre under a high, arched iron roof, pierced by countless small holes that let shafts of light fall onto the crowd; many of them are said to date from gunfire and shrapnel during fighting in the 1920s. The souq takes its name from the Ottoman sultan Abdul Hamid II, under whom it was rebuilt in the late nineteenth century, and is lined with shops selling clothes, fabrics, perfume and sweets. At its eastern end the roof stops abruptly at the columns and pediment of the Roman Temple of Jupiter's western gateway, standing in the open air in front of the mosque.

TipBakdash, an ice-cream parlour in the souq known for its mastic-scented booza pounded with pistachios, has been a Damascus institution for more than a century.

Completed in the early eighth century under the caliph al-Walid I, the Great Mosque of Damascus is one of the oldest and most important mosques in the world, and its plan influenced mosque architecture for centuries. The site has been sacred for perhaps three thousand years: an Aramaean temple of the storm god Hadad, then the Roman Temple of Jupiter, then a Christian basilica dedicated to John the Baptist. A shrine said to hold the head of John the Baptist (revered as the prophet Yahya in Islam) still stands inside the prayer hall, and Christians as well as Muslims come to pray there.

The vast marble courtyard is the heart of the city. Its arcades and the treasury dome raised on columns still carry large areas of the original gold and green glass mosaics, showing rivers, trees and fantastic palaces, the work of craftsmen from the Byzantine tradition. Three minarets rise at the corners, including the Minaret of Jesus, where local tradition holds that Christ will descend at the end of time.

TipThe mosque has historically admitted non-Muslim visitors outside prayer times; women have been asked to wear a hooded robe provided at the entrance, and everyone removes their shoes.

In a small garden against the north wall of the Umayyad Mosque, a modest domed building holds the tomb of Salah ad-Din, the Kurdish-born sultan who recaptured Jerusalem from the crusaders in 1187 and died in Damascus in 1193. Inside are two cenotaphs: the original carved walnut one, and a white marble tomb donated in 1898 by the German emperor Wilhelm II during his visit to the city. The contrast between the austere building and the scale of the man's reputation, in both the Islamic world and medieval European legend, is striking.

Built in 1749–50 for As'ad Pasha al-Azm, the Ottoman governor of Damascus, this palace is the finest surviving example of the city's grand courtyard houses. Bands of black basalt, white limestone and golden sandstone stripe the walls around a garden of citrus trees, fountains and pools, and the reception rooms have painted and gilded wooden ceilings. The palace houses a museum of popular arts and traditions, with tableaux of Damascene domestic life, costume and crafts, and it gives a vivid sense of how the city's wealthy families once lived behind blank street walls.

The Street Called Straight of the Acts of the Apostles, where Saul of Tarsus was taken after his blinding vision on the road to Damascus, follows the line of the Roman decumanus maximus, which ran the full width of the walled city from west to east. Today it is narrower and busier than its Roman ancestor, lined with spice shops, woodworkers and khans, and its eastern half passes through the old Christian quarter, with churches of several denominations close by. Near its midpoint stands a reconstructed Roman arch, a remnant of the colonnaded avenue.

Down a quiet lane near Bab Sharqi, the eastern gate of the Old City, steps lead down into a small stone crypt venerated as the house of Ananias, the disciple who, according to Acts, restored Saul's sight and baptised him, after which Saul became the apostle Paul. The underground chapel, simple and lit by candles, sits at the level of the ancient city, several metres below today's street. Bab Sharqi itself is the only one of the Roman gates of Damascus to survive largely in its original form, and the lanes of Bab Touma nearby are among the most atmospheric in the Old City.

Around 140 kilometres south of Damascus, near the Jordanian border, Bosra was the capital of the Roman province of Arabia, and its black basalt Roman theatre, built in the second century AD, is one of the best preserved anywhere, with seating for around 17,000 people. It survived because the Ayyubids wrapped it inside a massive fortress in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, turning the theatre itself into the citadel's core. The town also has Roman baths, a colonnaded street, early Christian churches and the Mabrak mosque, linked by tradition to the Prophet Muhammad's camel.

Bosra lies in Daraa province, where fighting was intense during the war; UNESCO has reported damage from military activity at the site, and the wider south remains volatile.

Built into a cleft in the cliffs of the Qalamoun mountains about 55 kilometres north-east of Damascus, Maaloula is one of the very few places where a form of Western Aramaic, a language related to the one spoken by Jesus, is still in daily use. Its pastel houses climb the rock face around the convent of Saint Thecla, built around the cave and spring associated with the early Christian saint, and the monastery of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, one of the oldest surviving churches in Syria.

Maaloula was seized by armed opposition groups in 2013, and a group of nuns from the Saint Thecla convent was held captive for several months before being released in 2014. Churches, monasteries and icons were damaged and looted during the fighting, and many residents left; parts of the village have since been restored.

In an oasis in the Syrian desert, about 215 kilometres north-east of Damascus, Palmyra grew rich on the caravan trade between the Roman Empire and the East, and under Queen Zenobia in the third century AD briefly challenged Rome itself. Its long colonnaded street, theatre, agora and the great Temple of Bel, dedicated in AD 32, blended Greco-Roman architecture with local and Persian traditions into something unique, which is why UNESCO listed it in 1980.

Palmyra suffered some of the most deliberate destruction of cultural heritage of the century. Islamic State fighters held the site from May 2015 to March 2016 and again from December 2016 to March 2017. In August 2015 they murdered Khaled al-Asaad, the 82-year-old archaeologist who had looked after the site for decades. They blew up the Temple of Baalshamin and the main sanctuary of the Temple of Bel, leaving only its gateway and outer walls, destroyed several of the famous tower tombs, demolished the Monumental Arch, and in early 2017 wrecked much of the Tetrapylon and the stage façade of the theatre. The site museum was also damaged and its statues smashed. Much of the colonnade survives, and international teams have documented the losses with a view to future restoration.

Standing on a ridge above the Homs Gap, the passage between the mountains and the Mediterranean coast, Krak des Chevaliers is perhaps the best preserved crusader castle in the world. The Knights Hospitaller rebuilt it in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with two concentric rings of walls and massive round towers, and the Mamluk sultan Baybars took it in 1271. T. E. Lawrence, who studied it as a young man, called it perhaps the most wholly admirable castle in the world. Inside are a Gothic loggia, a chapel turned mosque and vaulted halls.

The castle was occupied by opposition fighters and hit by shelling and airstrikes before government forces retook it in 2014; UNESCO, which lists it with the Qal'at Salah El-Din fortress, recorded damage to towers and interior structures, and some repair work has since taken place.

Along the Orontes river in the city of Hama, enormous wooden water wheels, some around 20 metres in diameter, turn slowly in the current, lifting water into stone aqueducts that once irrigated gardens and supplied houses and mosques. Wheels have turned here since at least the Byzantine period, and the surviving ones mostly date from the Ayyubid and Mamluk eras onwards, rebuilt many times. The creaking, groaning sound they make as they turn is one of the most memorable things about the city.

Several norias were reported damaged or left idle during the war years, and Hama's old quarters still bear the scars of the government's assault on the city in 1982.

Founded by the Seleucid kings after the death of Alexander the Great, Apamea became one of the great cities of Roman Syria, and its main colonnaded street, almost two kilometres long, is among the longest in the Roman world. Many of the columns, some with spiralling fluted shafts, were re-erected by archaeologists in the twentieth century, and they stand in open farmland above the Ghab plain with a medieval castle at Qalaat al-Madiq on the hill nearby.

Apamea became one of the most widely cited examples of wartime looting in Syria: satellite images taken from 2012 onwards showed the site pitted with thousands of illegal excavation holes.

Rising on a vast mound above the centre of Aleppo, the citadel has been fortified since antiquity; its present walls, moat and towering gateway, approached by a stepped bridge, are largely the work of the Ayyubid ruler az-Zahir Ghazi around 1200, with Mamluk additions. Inside are mosques, a palace with a fine throne hall and the remains of a Hittite-era temple. Below it spread Aleppo's old souqs, once among the largest covered markets in the world, and the Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo.

The Ancient City of Aleppo was badly damaged during the battle for the city from 2012 to 2016. Large sections of the souqs burned in 2012, the eleventh-century minaret of the Great Mosque collapsed in 2013, and the citadel's gate was hit by shelling and its walls damaged by a tunnel bomb in 2015. The earthquake of 6 February 2023 caused further damage to the citadel, including its entrance tower. Restoration of the souqs and parts of the citadel has been under way, with the citadel reopening to visitors in 2024 after repairs.