Ancient Villages of Northern Syria

Abandoned a millennium ago yet astonishingly intact, some forty villages scattered across the limestone hills of north-western Syria preserve everyday rural life from late Antiquity. Built between the 1st and 7th centuries and deserted by the 10th, their houses, churches, temples, bathhouses and cisterns trace the countryside's slow turn from Roman paganism to Byzantine Christianity. The so-called Dead Cities were inscribed by UNESCO in 2011.