After spending a couple of days in Aleppo, an ancient trading city, we drove around northwest Syria to the ruins of the Citadel of San Simeon, the ancient city of Ebla, and the Roman village of Apamea. We spent the night in Hama, and then visited the Crusader castle Crac des Chevaliers. The western strip of Syria is all quite fertile and green, unlike the rest of the country which is largely desert.

Aleppo is dominated by the old Citadel on the hill in the middle of the city, surrounded by a moat. Next to it is an ancient market area, which still sells goods to Syrians and tourists.

Absolut Citadel.

On three occasions, friendly young Syrians came up to us on the street and started talking to us. It turned out that all three of them worked for the same carpet shop, which improbably has a poster celebrating Oscar Wilde.

These are the ruins of Qala'at Semaan, the basilica of St. Simon Stylites. The monk who lived there sat atop a high pillar for the last 36 years of his life. All that was left of the pillar was this large boulder -- apparently pieces of it have been claimed as souvenirs over the years.

The western Syrian countryside viewed from the basilica.

The ancient city of Ebla, whose 15 decades of fame came between 2400 and 2250 BC, when it was sacked by the Akkadians from Mesopotamia under Naram Sin. The site is not terribly well marked nor terribly impressive, just an archaeological dig in the middle a plain surrounded at middle distance by low lying hills with wheat fields sloping gently up --- until you realize that those distant hills are the remains of city walls thirty meters thick and 20 meters high, and the place where you are standing was the palace at the center of a city of hundreds of thousands of individuals who had independently come to the conclusion that the amber waves of grain beyond the walls were a special sign that God favored Ebla and always would. A real Ozymandias moment.

Apamea, a Roman ruin from 64 BC. The colonnade extends for about a mile. Many of the columns are still standing, and they suddenly appear in otherwise flat farmland as you arrive.

A water wheel in Hama, which made delightful groans as it turned.

Crac des Chevaliers, a castle built by the Crusaders and used by Romans and Muslims in the centuries which followed. This view shows a part of the moat. The castle controls the main pass between Syria and the coast, whose importance has not diminished throughout the centuries as it now carries a freeway and Syria's main oil pipeline.

Looking east from the castle.

On to Palmyra