754 Items
Resafa City Gates and Walls
The impressively preserved city walls of Resafa are the subject of some debate when regards to their age and to who's reign their construction can be credited to. Scholars seem to be split as to whether they were constructed in the reigns of the Emperor Anastasius (491-518 AD) or the Emperor Justinian (527-565 AD). Procopius' attributes the first stone wall to the reign of Justinian. However this cannot be wholly accepted as fact as Procopius' accounts are occasionally deliberately misleading and sometimes wholly inaccurate. The most well preserved and impressive of the gates still extant is the Sura Gate on the north side of the city.
Regardless of which reign they were constructed in the defences do seem to be Late Antique. The walls, their covered galleries, the towers and gates were well preserved when I visited in 2010. As a result of the civil war their current condition is hard to ascertain.
Type: Architecture
Tags: Anastasius, C4th-C5th, C5th-C6th, C6th-C7th, C7th-C8th, C8th-C9th, Defensive Network, Justinian, Late Antique, Procopius, Resafa
South Basilica, Side
Situated towards the southernmost point of the peninsular that Side occupies this Basilica was built in the 5th century AD usurping and partly building over the sites of the older Temples Apollo and Athena. The large basilica was destroyed in the 7th century and a smaller church was built within.
Type: Architecture
Tags: Basilica, Byzantine, Church, Late Antique, Roman, Turkey
Late Antique Walls, Side
In Late Antiquity the city of Side had a much shorter, strategic line of defences built within its original line of Hellenic walls. These new defences incorporated the theatre as part of the defensive line. The triumphal arch attached to the theatre also became part of the defences and the arch's aperture was significantly reduced. The new defences were built primarily of spolia looted from derelict or abandoned buildings in and around the city. The clearest evidence of spolia use in the walls can be seen in the use of column drums usually included to add strength to the walls by tying the two outer faces together. The last image, in the background, behind the building covered in scaffolding (The temple of Tyche), shows the late antique part of the wall in front of the theatre.
Type: Architecture
Tags: Fortifications, Late Antique, Military Architecture, Turkey
Martyrium of St Phillip, Hierapolis
This church on the hills above and north of the city proper of Hierapolis is believed to be the martyrium where the remains of St Phillip were interred.
Type: Architecture
Tags: Church, Late Antique, Martyrium, Turkey
Temple of Aphrodite/Christian Basilica, Aphrodisias
Begun in the 1st century the construction of the Temple of Aphrodite was paid for by Aphrodisias’ most famous and wealthy citizen, Zoilos. In the 2nd century AD the temple had a colonnaded courtyard enclosure built around it. Around 500 AD the temple was converted into a Basilica church and was extensively rebuilt and remodelled into a building much larger than the original temple.
Type: Architecture
Tags: Basilica, Church, Greek, Late Antique, Roman, Temple, Turkey
New Church at Dayr Mar Elian
Images of the new church built at Dayr Mar Elian once it was established that the church built in 1938 was unstable and needed to be demolished. A traditionally-built small chapel was built over the sarcophagus and this larger, more modern church was built to the west of the cloister.
Type: Architecture
Tags: Archaeological Excavation, Church, Dayr Mar Elian, Icon, Mar Elian, Mar Elian esh-Sharqi, Monastery, Qaryatayn, Syria, Syrian Civil War
Byzantine Reliquaries
The damaged remains of two Byzantine reliquaries were found during the excavations at Dayr Mar Elian. The lid of one replicates a Roman sarcophagus and the other piece is a base of a different size decorated with a motif of ringed circles.
Type: Archaeological Excavation
Tags: Archaeological Excavation, Dayr Mar Elian, Dayr Mar Elian Archaeological Project, Mar Elian, Mar Elian esh-Sharqi, Monastery, Qaryatayn, Reliquary, Sculpture, Syria, Syrian Civil War
Dayr Mar Elian
These images show the cloister of Dayr Mar Elian esh-Sharqi after the Syrian team from the Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM) finished their work at the site. A strategy for preserving the site has been indefinitely delayed by the start of the Syrian civil war.
Type: Archaeological Excavation
Tags: Archaeological Excavation, Church, Dayr Mar Elian, Dayr Mar Elian Archaeological Project, Mar Elian, Mar Elian esh-Sharqi, Monastery, Qaryatayn, Syria, Syrian Civil War
The Church of the Entrance of the Theotokos in the Temple, Hama
This church dates back to the C5th, but has been damaged and rebuilt many times over its history. Before the current civil war, it was last rebuilt in the 1990s having sustained damage in the 1982 offensive by the Syrian government against the Muslim Brotherhood in the city. Elements of the earliest structure do survive and it is particularly interesting for being a transverse-nave church, a type more usually found in the Tur Abdin region of Turkey.
Although Hama, then known as Epiphania, was an important Christian centre in late antiquity, more recently it had one of the smallest Christian communities in a major city. For that reason this entry is linked to nearby Homs, rather than treating Hama as a separate collection of data.
Type: Architecture
Tags: Architecture, C20th, C5th, Church, Hama, Syria, The Entrance of the Theotokos in the Temple, Transverse nave, Tur Abdin, Turkey
The Deir Mar Musa Censer
This is the text of a lecture given on the occasion of a facsimile of the censer taken from Deir Mar Musa by Richard Burton in the C19th being returned to the Community at a reception at the British Council in Damascus on September 27th 2001. The images cannot be included as the copyright for those rests with the British Museum.
Type: Text
Tags: An Nabk, British Museum, Censer, Deir Mar Musa, Mar Musa al-Habashi, Monastery, Nabk, Richard Burton, St. Moses, St. Moses the Abyssinian, St. Moses the Ethiopian, Syria