On Sunday, UNESCO director general Irina Bokova expressed dismay at the fire that severely damaged Syria’s Souk Al-Madina market. The organization believes the majority of Syria’s heritage sites have sustained damage in the fighting. Syria is a signatory to The Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in Armed Conflict, drawn up in 1954.
Here is a look at Syria’s world heritage sites, including Aleppo’s Old City, one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, where rebels and the Syrian army are fighting for control.
* ALEPPO — The ancient Silk Road city, with its leafy streets and faded, old-world hotels, was spared serious violence in the early months of the uprising against President Bashar Assad. In July, rebel fighters took over several districts of Aleppo, prompting Assad to send military reinforcements to try to seize back control of the country’s biggest city. Last weekend the Souk Al-Madina, the city market, which contained 1,550 shops and dated back to the Middle Ages, was gutted by fire.
Aleppo is in northwest Syria, about 30 miles (50 km) south of the Turkish border, and was put on UNESCO’s World Heritage List in 1986. It is at the crossroads of historic commercial routes, some 60 miles (100 km) from the Mediterranean Sea and the Euphrates River.
The 13th-century citadel, 12th-century Great Mosque and various 17th-century madrasas, palaces and hammams form part of the city’s unique urban fabric, now threatened with destruction.
* PALMYRA — A desert oasis 130 miles east of Damascus, Palmyra contains the ruins of a city that was one of the most important cultural centers of the ancient world. It was an established caravan oasis when it came under Roman control in the first century AD as part of the Roman province of Syria.
*CRAC DES CHEVALIERS and QAL’AT SALAH EL-DIN — The Crac des Chevaliers castle was built by the Hospitaller Order of Saint
John of Jerusalem in the 12th-13th centuries and ranks among the best-preserved examples of the Crusader castles. The Qal’at
Salah El-Din (Fortress of Saladin), partly in ruins, retains features from its Byzantine beginnings in the 10th century.
* BOSRA — Bosra is a major archaeological site, containing ruins from Roman, Byzantine and Muslim times. The city also includes Nabataean and Roman monuments, Christian churches, mosques and Madrasas.
* DAMASCUS — The ancient city has around 125 monuments from different periods of its history, including the eighth-century
Great Mosque of the Umayyads.
* ANCIENT VILLAGES — Some 40 villages grouped in eight parks situated in north-western Syria date from the first to seventh centuries. They were abandoned in the eighth to 10th centuries and feature the remains of churches and bathhouses.
