Syria

Syria is one of the oldest inhabited regions on Earth. Damascus and Aleppo vie for the title of longest continuously occupied city; Ebla, Mari, and Ugarit were Bronze Age powers, and Ugarit produced one of the first alphabets. The land passed through Aramean, Assyrian, Persian, Greek, and Roman hands — Palmyra grew rich as a caravan city and briefly rebelled under Queen Zenobia — and became an early centre of Christianity.

The Muslim conquest of the 630s made Damascus the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate, the first great Islamic empire, whose Great Mosque still stands. Later came the Abbasids, the Crusader states on the coast, Saladin, the Mamluks, and from 1516 four centuries of Ottoman rule. After the First World War, France governed Syria under a League of Nations mandate, drawing borders and favouring minorities in ways that shaped later politics.

Syria became fully independent in 1946 and then unstable, with repeated coups and a brief union with Egypt. The Baʿath Party seized power in 1963, and Hafez al-Assad, from the Alawite minority, took control in 1970, building a security state that his son Bashar inherited in 2000. Peaceful protests in 2011, part of the Arab Spring, were met with force and spiralled into a civil war drawing in ISIS, Kurdish forces, Turkey, Iran, Russia, the United States, and Gulf states. Hundreds of thousands were killed, half the population displaced, and cities like Aleppo and Homs shattered. In December 2024 a rebel offensive took Damascus, Bashar al-Assad fled to Russia, and a transitional government began the uncertain task of rebuilding.

Syria is religiously and ethnically diverse: a Sunni Arab majority alongside Alawites, Christians of many churches, Druze, Ismailis, and Twelver Shia, and ethnic Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, Turkmen, and Circassians. Cities like Damascus and Aleppo historically wove these communities together in shared quarters, markets, and trades — a coexistence badly strained by the war.

Hospitality is a defining value: guests are pressed with coffee, tea, and food, and refusing outright can cause offence. Family and clan networks are central, respect for elders is expected, and modest dress is the norm, more strictly in conservative and rural areas. Religious festivals — the two Eids, Ramadan evenings, Easter — punctuate the year for their respective communities.

Syria has a deep tradition in poetry, music (the muwashshah and the Aleppo qudud), calligraphy, brocade weaving, inlaid woodwork, and soap-making, and Syrians take pride in a cultural heritage far older than the modern state.

Before the war, around 21 million people lived in Syria; years of conflict have displaced more than half of them, with millions abroad as refugees — chiefly in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan — and millions more uprooted inside the country. Some have begun returning since 2024, to homes and neighbourhoods often in ruins.

The economy has collapsed. The currency is a fraction of its former value, sanctions cut Syria off from the banking system, and there are chronic shortages of fuel, electricity, bread, and medicine. Much of the population relies on remittances and humanitarian aid, and reconstruction needs are measured in hundreds of billions of dollars.

Daily life in the more stable areas has meant coping — queuing for subsidised bread and fuel, rationed power, disrupted schooling, and navigating checkpoints — against a backdrop of cautious hope, and considerable uncertainty, about the transition.

Syrian cuisine is a high point of the eastern Mediterranean table. Aleppo in particular is famed for its food — muhammara (walnut and red-pepper dip), kibbeh in dozens of forms, cherry kebab (kebab karaz), and liberal use of Aleppo pepper. Meze spreads of hummus, baba ghanoush, fattoush, tabbouleh, muhammara, stuffed vine leaves, and pickles open a proper meal.

Mains include grilled meats, shawarma, freekeh (roasted green wheat) with chicken, yalanji, maqluba-style layered rice dishes, and slow-cooked stews (yakhne). Flatbread is eaten with everything, and fatteh — bread, chickpeas, yoghurt, and ghee — is a classic breakfast.

Sweets are a Damascus speciality: baklava, barazek sesame biscuits, halawet el-jibn, and booza, the stretchy pounded ice cream. Bitter cardamom coffee, sweet tea, and — before restrictions — arak, the aniseed spirit, accompany gatherings.

Syria's cultural sites are extraordinary and, in several cases, war-damaged. The UNESCO-listed ancient cities of Damascus and Aleppo — the Umayyad Mosque, the covered souqs, the citadels — remain the heart of any visit, though Aleppo's souq and Great Mosque minaret suffered heavily. Krak des Chevaliers, the best-preserved Crusader castle anywhere, came through relatively intact.

Palmyra, the desert caravan city, was deliberately dynamited by ISIS in 2015–16, which destroyed the Temple of Bel, the monumental arch, and tower tombs; much of the colonnade and theatre still stand, and stabilisation work has begun. The "Dead Cities" — hundreds of abandoned Byzantine settlements in the northwest — and the great pilgrimage church of Saint Simeon Stylites are also UNESCO-listed.

Beyond the ruins are the Mediterranean coast around Latakia and Tartus, the Orontes valley and the norias (water wheels) of Hama, the crusader coastal castles, the monastery towns of the Qalamoun, and the basalt landscapes of the Hauran in the south. When and whether they can be safely visited depends entirely on the course of the transition.