Resafa

Resafa was Sergiopolis, the pilgrimage city of Saint Sergius, and its walls still stand almost complete in open desert: a rectangle of gypsum stone that catches the light and seems to glow, with towers, gates, the shells of great basilicas and enormous vaulted cisterns that made a city possible where there is no river. An Umayyad caliph later kept a residence here. The northern gate, with its carved arcade, is one of the finest pieces of Byzantine architecture in Syria.

Background

Resafa, also spelled Rusafa, was briefly called Anastasiopolis, the city of Anastasius, and lay in the Roman province of Euphratensis, southwest of Raqqa and the Euphrates. It matches the Akkadian Raṣappa and the Biblical Rezeph named in Isaiah 37:12, and the site goes back to the 9th century BC. Procopius described at length the walls and buildings Justinian put up here. The walls run over 1600 feet long and about 1000 feet wide, with round or square towers at intervals of about a hundred feet. Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, an Umayyad caliph of the eighth century, chose the city as his preferred residence and built several palaces around it. The city was abandoned in the 13th century.

Source: Wikipedia, "Resafa"

Highlights

• The city walls - the near-complete circuit of glowing gypsum.
• The north gate - the carved triple entrance arcade.
• The basilicas - the shells of the pilgrimage churches.
• The cisterns - vaulted underground reservoirs of huge size.

When to go

March to April and October to November are mild; summer in the open desert is severe. Low sun makes the gypsum walls luminous.

Good to know

The site is in open desert with no facilities or shade, and access needs local arrangement. Parts of the walls and vaults are unstable. Water and everything else must be carried.

Nearby

Raqqa and the Euphrates are north, and the desert road runs south.

Key facts