East of Antioch and west of Aleppo, the land rises into limestone hill country. It was—until recently—empty, barren, and lonely but beautiful in the springtime, with flowers, green grass, and red earth contrasting with the gray of abandoned buildings. These are the “Dead Cities of Upper Syria,” as the French Jesuit scholar and explorer Father Joseph Mattern dubbed them in the 1920s, a once heavily populated zone of Byzantine Christian Syria until the seventh century.
It was not only populated but prosperous. The several hundred ruined settlements—towns and villages more than actual cities—are well built in stone, and the carving and artistry of acanthus leaves, bunches of grapes, geometric patterns, and monograms of Christ are of superb quality and mostly intact after more than thirteen centuries. A Greek inscription on one site, possibly a church, still reads, “You have given happiness to my heart. For our harvests of wheat, wine, and oil we are overflowing with peace. Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit.” The symbols of Christianity are everywhere in the Dead Cities, but there are no Christians. I once asked a Kurdish goatherd who he thought had built such splendid buildings, and he answered me in broken Arabic, “Saladin?”
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