The Dead Cities of Christian Syria

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Under Roman and Byzantine rule, ancient Syria became the first predominantly Christian province in the Middle East. Between the fourth and seventh centuries, many of the region’s Christian communities shared in a distinctive religious, literary, and architectural culture. Now abandoned and dubbed the “Dead Cities,” copious stone-built towns and villages on the Aleppo Plateau in northwest Syria bear witness to that glorious past.

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Footnotes

1. Robert Edwards, “Antioch’s Silent Guardians,” BAR, Summer 2024.

2. Jordan J. Ryan, “The Life of Jesus Written in Stone,” BAR, Winter 2024.

3. Yizhar Hirschfeld, “Spirituality in the Judean Desert,” BAR, September/October 1995.

Endnotes

1. Howard Crosby Butler, Early Churches in Syria: Fourth to Seventh Centuries (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1929), p. 3.

2. The British explorer and diplomat Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) commented that the church represented “the beginning of a new chapter in the architecture of the world. The fine and simple beauty of Romanesque was born in North Syria.” See G. Bell, Syria: The Desert and the Sown (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1907), p. 306.