Damascus

We left Aleppo, where everyone has satellite dish TV, and drove south to Damascus

Sometimes we found the road signs confusing

The relative fertility of the North

One of the wooden water wheels of Hama, built in Roman times.

Built by the romans to lift water into aqueducts and transport it miles away, these are still working, creaking away.

The wind gets strong as you go south

The sky bigger, the soil dryer and sandier

If there are hills, they are rugged and inhospitable

Damascus, of course, needs drains, like any city!

The Romans were here too.

And the Christians. this minaret has been built above an old Christian Bell tower, and the original church included within the mosque

This is the part of the old city wall that St Paul was lowered down to escape capture. It is called something like St Pauls gate.

Palmyra - home of the warrior queen Zenobia

 We took a drive out into the Syrian desert to visit Palmyra, an oasis and the site of a city of Roman ruins.This is what Felix found out about Palmyra:

Palmyra

Palmyra was a settlement in prehistoric times because it was an oasis.  There are traces of buildings 5 thousand  years old.  The old name of Palmyra was Tadmor which was already known to the Assyrians.  It was then occupied by the Greeks, and finally the Romans.  In the 2^nd century A.D. Palmyra traded all the way to China and Italy. All the major temples of Palmyra where enlarged.  Palmyra expanded and became one of the great cities of the orient .

The most famous ruler of Palmyra was the warrior queen Zenobia.  She was an ambitious and courageous queen.  She spoke Aramaean as well as Greek and Egyptian and claimed to be a descendant of Queen Cleopatra.  Dressed in purple with a helmet on her head, she would address a crowd as would an Emperor.  She had pale skin, black eyes and beautiful teeth, as white as pearls.  Zenobia’s son became the heir to the throne when he was very young, so Zenobia proclaimed herself queen and declared her independence from Rome.  Aurelian, the Roman Emperor at the time, attacked Palmyra.         

 First, Aurelian fought the Palmyrenes on the plain of Emesa and defeated them, so they withdrew to Palmyra.  It took a week for Aurelian to get there through the desert, being attacked by Bedouins.  His Army laid siege to the fortified city of Palmyra.  After weeks of fighting, Queen Zenobia was escorted on a camel, as she went to her ally Sapor.  She was captured by Aurelian’s horsemen when she was about to cross the Euphrates and Palmyra was overtaken.

Palmyra became Christian during the 4^th century, and Muslim during the 7^th century.  Its temples where converted to Churches then Mosques.  During the Ottoman Empire Palmyra declined, but in the last 50 years it has become once again an important oasis, and one of the most important tourism site in the Middle East.  

My visit to Palmyra:

We went inside the temple of Bel, where they made animal sacrifices to the gods.  There was a path with seats on either side where they lead the animals in a great procession to the temple.  In the museum we saw some clay tokens that were used as tickets for spectators to see the sacrifices.  There was a roman theatre and walkways lined on either side by columns holding up a roof.  Inside and outside these walkways, we saw ruins of shops and houses.   We went to the valley of tombs where we went inside one.  There were shelves to keep the coffins in.  One tomb tower could hold about 70 coffins.     

Bedouin camps on the way to Palmyra

Camels

Desert

Model of the temple of Bel

The central part of the Temple of Bel, where animal sacrifices were held.

Roman columns

These columns are what's left of the perimeter of the Temple of Bel, as seen in the model above.

Dani and Nonno checking out the carvings

The Cardo in Palmyra - Roman cities have in common a long central main street called the Cardo, lined with columns. The one in Palmyra is very long, with many columns still standing

Tai and Barney riding camels - Felix wasn't game yet. The backdrop to the Roman ruins is a craggy castle, built by Muslim rulers after the Romans, sitting on a high hill.

Intricate carvings on a coffin

View of the Palmyra ruins from the castle

Inside the castle. Palmyra is in the background, with the Cardo leading away from the castle toward the Temple of Bel at the rear. You can see the green of the oasis that provided the reason for Palmyra being there.

Tomb towers of Palmyra

This is what the tombs look like close-up (except they're not sideways in real life (can't quite work that out))

Inside the towers is places to park a coffin, room for up to 100

Bedouin woman with tribal tattoos

Bedouin camp spotted beside the road on the way home

Dates were in season in Palmyra, with differen varieties hanging up outside the shops: yummy

Visiting farmers in remote villages

 We accompanied Nonno on his visits to some very remote farmers' villages, where he handed over computers. At each place we were invited to share a traditional meal.

On our way north we had a swim in the Euphrates

Achmed, a teacher, electrician and farmer

Young girl in Achmed's home

Mohammed's house

Breakfast at Achmed's house

Handing over the computer to Mohammed

A delicious lunch of lamb, burghul and freekeh, with side salad, bread and yoghurt, in Mohammed's home. The meal was shared on a plastic tablecloth, sitting on the floor.

We were treated like special guests - i.e. the brain was extracted from the sheep's head and presented to us especially.

Off to the loo in the gathering duststorm

Chatting with the women before heading off

Crusading - the Crac de Chevaliers

The next day we all travelled south to: The Crac des Chevaliers, which lies 65 kilometres west of the city of Homs which is an hour and a half south of Aleppo. It has its origins in the 11th century when, as home to a garrison of Kurdish soldiers, in the service of the Emir of Homs, it was known as the Castle of the Kurds (Hosn al-Akrad).

Tancred, a Prince of Antioch and Norman leader of the First Crusade occupied it in 1110 only to be besieged, unsuccessfully, five years later by Alp Arslan the Sultan of Aleppo.

The magnificent structure proudly stands high on the Jebel Ansarieh some 650 metres above the plain of Al-Bukeia with the Lebanon Mountains rising to the southwest.

Its strategic importance lay in the fact that it overlooked the Homs Gap, which gave access from the coast to the interior of Syria.

The castle, which dominates the landscape, became the headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem.

One of the main difficulties the Crusaders were faced with, in their occupation of the Holy, was their lack of manpower which hampered their ability to defend large sections of territory won in the First Crusade.

In 1142, this shortage of men prompted Raymond, Count of Tripoli, a vassal state of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, to give control of the mighty Crac des Chevalier to the Knights Hospitaller, which was originally a monastic brotherhood caring for Latin pilgrims in the Holy Land, before developing into a military order.

After a major earthquake in 1170 the Hospitallers were forced to rebuild large sections of the castle while taking the opportunity to made significant improvements to the defensive walls

It had two concentric defensive walls, separated by a moat, surrounding a central keep. Its innovative design allowed the construction of a: “Triangular shaped gallery with ribbed vaults designed like a fortified barracks and flanked by five square towers. A chapel, financed by King Vladislas of Bohemia, was added in the northwest tower.

The castle is a UNESCO World Heritage Site

UNESCO said: “The castle is amongst the most extraordinary examples of castle architecture and symbolise the phase of the Crusades in the Holy Land.”

Further unsuccessful attacks were made by Nur ed Ein, Sultan of Damascus in 1153 and Saladin in 1188 before it finally fell to Baybars, Mamluk Sultan of Egypt and Syria in 1271.

The castle sits out on the end of a high spur, with a commanding view

Detail from a window edge, carved into the stone.

The outer walls. See the little family at the foot of the fortifications?

This is the inner fortification. The low wall on the right hand side of the photo is about 3m high; this is the inside of the top 3m of the outer fortification shown in the photo above. In the past the dirt in between wasn’t there, it was the moat!

This is what the whole lot would have looked like, with the steep slanting walls leading up out of the moat.

A view inside the second fortifications, where all where garrisoned.

View from the same height, but further around to the right.

Detail of windows to one of the halls

View along the gallery inside the outer fortifications. Defenders would run along here with fresh arrows (or whatever) for the guys looking down from the individual arrow slit windows.