The Dead Cities

Across the limestone massif west of Aleppo stand the Dead Cities: some seven hundred villages and towns of the Roman and Byzantine countryside, abandoned by the medieval era and never quarried away - houses with carved lintels, churches, olive presses and bath-houses standing roofless but structurally whole, a fossilised rural world unique on earth and inscribed by UNESCO as the Ancient Villages of Northern Syria. Serjilla and al-Bara are the storied ensembles - villas and pyramid tombs among the olives - and the massif's silver-green groves still frame the stones exactly as the late-antique farmers left them.

History

Some 700 abandoned settlements lie on the limestone massif between Aleppo and Idlib, most of them dating from the 1st to the 7th century and abandoned between the 8th and the 10th, with houses, pagan temples, churches, cisterns and baths. The historian Chris Wickham sees them as villages of prosperous peasants enriched by the olive oil trade of late antiquity, while others see trading towns on Byzantine routes that withered when trade shifted after the Arab conquest; either way they show the passage from the pagan Roman world to Byzantine Christianity. They became a World Heritage Site in 2011 as the Ancient Villages of Northern Syria and have been on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2013 (Wikipedia, Dead Cities).

The main sights

• Serjilla - the villa town with its baths and taverna.
• Al-Bara's pyramid tombs - the massif's monumental farewells.
• The carved lintels - late-antique craftsmanship at village scale.
• The olive settings - groves framing the stone as ever.

When to go

Spring and autumn suit the massif's open walking. Arrange the trip through specialist local operators.

Good to know

Some ensembles may be closed in any given period. The heritage's fragility asks the lightest possible footprint.

Nearby

Aleppo's citadel city and the massif's olive villages.

Key facts