Damascus

• 1. Introduction

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  Damascus once drew an extravagant outburst from Mark Twain in his travel book The Innocents Abroad. He addressed the city directly. "Though old as history itself, thou art fresh as the breath of spring," he wrote. He went on to call it "blooming as thine own rose-bud, and fragrant as thine own orange flower, O Damascus, pearl of the East!" The city he praised is the capital of Syria, and it is described as the world's oldest capital. Its Arabic name is Dimashq, and poets call it the City of Jasmine. Yet in 2023 a global liveability ranking placed it last out of 173 cities. A place can be both of those things at once, and this documentary asks how. How did a settlement between mountains and desert hold its ground while empires rose and fell around it? Why does one city carry so many names in so many languages? And what is it like to walk through a modern capital built on the layers of its own past?

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• 2. Names Across Languages

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  Scribes of the Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III wrote the city's name as tjmsqw in a geographical list from the 15th century BC. Nobody is certain what it meant. One reading splits it into a prefix for a place, a hieroglyph tied to skins or leather, and a word for hills. That would give something like the place of the hills. The label suits an oasis at the foot of rugged country that any Egyptian army had to cross. Letters found at Amarna, from the 14th century BC, spell the name in Akkadian as Dimašqa and Dimašqì.

  Assyrian records give a stranger version. In Neo-Assyrian Akkadian the city appears as Ša-imerišu, which translates as a place of donkeys. The name points to a caravan stop where travellers could swap tired animals for fresh ones. Aramaic and Biblical Hebrew spellings, Damašq and Dammeśeq, often carry an extra letter r, perhaps influenced by a root meaning dwelling. A Syriac form, Darmsûq, is taken to mean a well-watered land.

  The Greeks preferred myth. One account says the city was named for a giant called Ascus. Another credits Damaskos, a son of the god Hermes and the nymph Alimede. He left Arcadia, reached Syria and established a city that took his name. The third version is darker. Dionysus filled Syria with fertile vineyards, and a man named Damaskos took an axe to them. Dionysus chased him and flayed him. His original name, Darmaskos, is said to have evolved into Damaskos. English and Latin took Damascus from that Greek form.

  In Arabic the city is Dimashq, but its residents call it aš-Šām. That word also stands for the Levant and for Syria as a whole, and Turkish uses the short form Şam. The root is tied to direction. Someone in the Hijaz who faces the sunrise finds the north on the left, so the term means the left-hand side, or the north. Yemen takes its name from the opposite direction, the right-hand side, which means the south.

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• 3. Oasis at the Crossroads

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  Rainfall in Damascus averages around 130 mm a year, falling between October and May. For a city of such age, that is startlingly little. The cause is the Anti-Lebanon range, whose peaks top 10,000 ft and block moisture coming off the Mediterranean, 80 km away. The city stands at an elevation of 680 m, in a cool arid climate. Summers are long, dry and hot. Winters are cool and somewhat rainy, and snow is infrequent.

  The Barada River supplied what the sky did not. Snowmelt in the mountains feeds its streams. That water nourished the Ghouta, farmland irrigated to grow vegetables, cereals and fruit since ancient times. Location did the rest. Two trade routes crossed here. One linked Egypt with Asia Minor from south to north. The other crossed the desert from east to west, joining Lebanon to the Euphrates valley.

  The walled old city stands on the Barada's southern bank. Outside it, districts first took shape along roads leading away from the gates, near the graves of revered figures. In the 19th century, villages spread up the slopes of Jabal Qasioun. To the north came Kurdish soldiers and Muslims who had fled Ottoman provinces in Europe. Their districts were called al-Akrad, the Kurds, and al-Muhajirin, the migrants.

  From the late 19th century a modern administrative centre rose west of the old city around al-Marjeh, the meadow. Its square held the city hall, while the courts, post office and railway station occupied rising ground a little farther south. In 1956-57 many Palestinian refugees settled in the Yarmouk district. Planners tried to spare the Ghouta, so growth went north to Mezzeh, Dummar and Barzeh. Poorer districts, often built without official approval, spread to the south. The modern city covers 105 km2, with 77 km2 of that built up, and Jabal Qasioun takes up the rest.

  The river paid the price. As housing and industry expanded, the Barada's flow fell until it was almost dry. The Fijeh spring, west along the valley, once provided drinking water, but runoff from busy roads, industry and sewage has polluted the lower aquifers. East of the city, maps of Roman Syria show the Barada emptying into a sizeable lake. That remnant now goes by the name Bahira Atayba, the hesitant lake, since it vanishes whenever a harsh drought arrives.

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• 4. Kingdom to Colony

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  Carbon-14 dating at Tell Ramad, on the outskirts of Damascus, suggests that people may have lived there around 6300 BC. Settlement in the wider Barada basin reaches back to 9000 BC. Yet no large settlement stood within the present walls until the second millennium BC. By about 1350 BC the Amarna letters name a ruler of Damascus, Biryawaza. In 1259 BC, under a treaty between the Hittite king Hattusili III and Ramesses II, control of the Damascus area passed to Egypt. Around 1200 BC the Sea Peoples arrived, and the Bronze Age in the region came to an end. Damascus stood at the edge of that turmoil, which still helped it rise as an influential centre.

  Genesis 14:15 mentions Damascus as already existing during the War of the Kings. In the 1st century the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus wrote that Uz, a son of Aram, founded it. He also quoted Nicholas of Damascus, who claimed that Abraham reigned there as a foreigner, arriving with an army from the land of the Chaldeans. By that account, a village in the Damascus region was still named The Habitation of Abraham.

  In the 11th century BC the Aramaeans, a Semitic people, arrived and entered the city without a battle. They dug canals and tunnels to make the most of the Barada. Later the Romans and the Umayyads upgraded the system. Even now it underlies the water supply of the old city. In 965 BC a man named Ezron was denied the throne of the Aramaean federation of Aram-Zobah. He fled the Beqaa Valley, seized Damascus by force and founded the independent state of Aram-Damascus.

  Ben-Hadad I, a grandson of Ezron, reigned from 880 to 841 BC and annexed Bashan, in today's Hauran region. His state went on the offensive against Israel. In 853 BC King Hadadezer led a Levantine coalition against the Neo-Assyrian army at the Battle of Qarqar. It included troops sent by King Ahab of Israel. Aram-Damascus won and held the Assyrians back for a time. Then Hadadezer was killed by his successor Hazael, and the alliance collapsed. When Assyria returned, Hazael retreated behind the city walls while the Assyrians plundered the rest of the kingdom.

  A revolt in 727 BC was put down by Assyrian forces, and Tiglath-Pileser III then campaigned across Syria to quell further uprisings. Assyrian rule brought calm and profits from the Arabian trade in spices and incense. In 694 BC the town was recorded as Šaʾimerišu, with a governor named Ilu-issīya. By 572 BC the Neo-Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar II controlled the whole of Syria, although little is known of how Damascus fared under Babylon.

  Alexander the Great conquered the city. After his death in 323 BC, the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires fought over it, and control passed back and forth. Alexander's general Seleucus I Nicator picked Antioch as his imperial capital, and that choice lowered the standing of Damascus. Demetrius III Philopator later laid the city out again on the Greek hippodamian grid and renamed it Demetrias.

  In 64 BC the Roman general Pompey annexed western Syria. Damascus joined the Decapolis, a league of ten cities, and gained autonomy within the province of Syria. The future emperor Trajan knew the city because his father, Marcus Ulpius Traianus, governed Syria from 73 to 74 AD. There Trajan met Apollodorus of Damascus, an architect and engineer of Greek descent. Apollodorus joined him in Rome in 91 AD, when Trajan was consul, and built several monuments in the 2nd century.

  By the start of the 2nd century Damascus was a metropolis. Around 125 AD the emperor Hadrian promoted it to Metropolis of Coele-Syria, and in 222 Septimius Severus raised it to a colonia. During the Pax Romana, caravan roads from southern Arabia, Palmyra, Petra and the Silk Road all met at Damascus. It fed Roman demand for eastern luxuries.

  During the Byzantine-Sasanian War of 602-628, the commander Shahrbaraz besieged and captured Damascus in 613. Many Byzantine soldiers were taken prisoner there.

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• 5. Caliphs and Aftershocks

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  A letter began the Prophet Muhammad's dealings with Damascus. His companion Shiya ibn Wahab carried it to Harith ibn Abi Shamir, king of the city. It read: "Peace be upon him who follows true guidance. Be informed that my religion shall prevail everywhere. You should accept Islam, and whatever under your command shall remain yours."

  Under Caliph Umar, the Rashidun Caliphate conquered most of the Syrian countryside. The general Khalid ibn al-Walid took Damascus itself in August-September 634, after an attempt in April had failed. Alarmed, the Byzantines under Emperor Heraclius fielded an army larger than the Rashidun force and advanced into southern Syria in the spring of 636. Khalid's men withdrew from the city. In August the armies clashed beside the Yarmouk River. A decisive Muslim victory there secured Muslim rule over Syria and Palestine.

  The population stayed mostly Christian, Eastern Orthodox and Monophysite, alongside a growing Muslim community from Mecca, Medina and the Syrian Desert. The governor of the new Islamic Syria was Mu'awiya I. After the death of the caliph Ali in 661, Mu'awiya became caliph himself. His clan, the Umayyads, owned vast assets in Damascus, and the city had old links to the Hijaz and to Christian Arab tribes. So he made it the capital of the entire Caliphate.

  Abd al-Malik took power in 685 and introduced Islamic coinage, with surplus revenue from the provinces sent to the treasury in Damascus. Arabic became the official language. That gave the city's Muslim minority an edge over Aramaic-speaking Christians in administrative work. In 706 his successor al-Walid began the Grand Mosque, also called the Umayyad Mosque, on the site of the Christian Cathedral of St. John. The Muslims kept its dedication to John the Baptist. It was complete by 715, the year al-Walid died.

  Soon the centre of gravity slipped. Suleiman chose Ramla as his residence, and Hisham chose Resafa. After Hisham's murder in 743, revolts spread through a Caliphate that by then reached from Spain to India. In 744 Marwan II moved the capital to Harran. On the 25th of August 750 the Abbasids took Damascus with little resistance. They had already beaten the Umayyads at the Battle of the Zab in Iraq.

  Baghdad became the new Islamic capital, and Damascus fell into its shadow. The last prominent Umayyads were executed, local officials were shunned, and generals from the city were dismissed. The Umayyad family cemetery was defiled, and the walls of the city were demolished. For the next century Damascus mostly vanishes from written records. The one notable Abbasid improvement was the treasury dome built in the Umayyad Mosque in 789. On the 24th of November 847 a multiple earthquake destroyed the city and killed about 70,000 people.

  Power then changed hands quickly. In 878-79 the Turkish governor Ahmad ibn Tulun seized Syria from the Abbasids. Out of respect for the Umayyads, he built a shrine at Mu'awiya's grave. The Qarmatians replaced the Tulunids in 906, and the Ikhshidids followed. The Shia Fatimids took control in 970, which inflamed relations with the city's Sunni Arabs. In 985 the geographer al-Muqaddasi called the architecture and infrastructure magnificent, yet he found living conditions awful. In 998 the Fatimid ruler al-Hakim executed hundreds of citizens for incitement. Then the records go quiet. By 1063 the city had no real administration, a weak economy and a greatly reduced population.

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• 6. Sieges and Sackings

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  The Seljuq Turks, nomads from Central Asia, arrived in the late 11th century, and Tutush I ruled Damascus from 1079. His son Duqaq succeeded him in 1095. The Seljuq court reversed Shia gains in the city. Private endowments paid for madrasas and for hospitals known as maristans, and religious life expanded. Damascus grew into a leading centre for spreading Islamic thought.

  The Crusaders reached the Levant in 1097 and seized Palestine, Mount Lebanon and Jerusalem. Duqaq tolerated them as a buffer against Fatimid Egypt. After he died in 1104, his mentor, or atabeg, Toghtekin took control and saw the newcomers as a real threat. Support from Mawdud of Mosul helped him stop raiding in the Golan and the Hauran. But in 1109 Mawdud was murdered inside the Umayyad Mosque, and Toghtekin agreed to a truce in 1110. In 1126 Baldwin II's army defeated Burid forces at Marj al-Saffar but failed to take Damascus.

  In 1129 around 6,000 Isma'ili Muslims died in the city, their leaders among them. Rumours said the Isma'ilis, who held the fort at Banias, planned to help the Crusaders take Damascus in return for Tyre. Soon afterwards the Crusaders prepared an assault with almost 2,000 knights and 10,000 foot soldiers. Buri, Toghtekin's son, allied with Imad al-Din Zengi and kept them away. A tangle of murders followed in the ruling family. Isma'ili agents assassinated Buri in 1132. His son Isma'il ruled tyrannically until his own mother, Safwat al-Mulk Zumurrud, secretly ordered his murder in 1135. Zengi married her in 1138.

  In 1144 Zengi conquered the crusader stronghold of Edessa. That loss prompted another crusade from Europe, which arrived in 1148. By then Zengi had been assassinated, and his son Nur ad-Din, emir of Aleppo, had allied with Damascus. The crusaders from Europe and the nobles of Jerusalem decided to attack the city, but the siege failed completely. When Damascus seemed close to collapse, the crusader army abruptly switched to a different stretch of ramparts and was repelled. By 1154 the city was firmly under Nur ad-Din.

  After his general Shirkuh died in 1169, Shirkuh's nephew Yusuf took his place. History knows him as Saladin. He overthrew the Fatimid caliphs and made himself Sultan of Egypt. Nur ad-Din and King Amalric of Jerusalem both died in 1174, leaving Saladin well placed to take control of Damascus. In July 1187 he destroyed the crusader army at Hattin, and Jerusalem fell in October. The shock in Europe produced the Third Crusade in 1189. Its leaders were Richard I of England, Philip II of France and Frederick I, Holy Roman Emperor, who drowned on the way. The Treaty of Jaffa ended it in 1192, and Saladin allowed pilgrimages to Jerusalem. He died in 1193.

  Independent Ayyubid rulers governed from Damascus during four periods: 1193 to 1201-1218 to 1238-1239 to 1245 and 1250 to 1260. Wars among the Ayyubids brought repeated sieges, as in 1229. Meanwhile the patterned silks of Byzantium and China reached the West through Damascus, one of the Silk Road's western termini. They gave the English language the word damask.

  On the 1st of March 1260 the Mongol commander Kitbuqa entered Damascus alongside Hethum I, King of Armenia, and Bohemond VI, Prince of Antioch. For the first time in six centuries, citizens saw three Christian rulers parade through their streets in triumph. On the 3rd of September 1260 Qutuz, Baybars and al-Mansur II Muhammad led the forces that defeated the Mongols at Ain Jalut. Five days later the city fell to the victors and became a Mamluk provincial capital governed from Egypt.

  In 1299 the Mongols under Ghazan won at Wadi al-Khaznadar and besieged the city for ten days. It surrendered between the 30th of December 1299 and the 6th of January 1300, though its Citadel held out. Ghazan left in February, probably because his horses needed fodder, and he left about 10,000 horsemen under the general Mulay. In May 1300 the Mamluks returned without a battle. In April 1303 they defeated the Mongols and their Armenian allies at Marj al-Saffar, ending the Mongol invasions of the Levant.

  The Black Death of 1348-49 took as many as half of the city's residents. In 1400 the conqueror Timur besieged the city. A deputation sent by the Mamluk sultan from Cairo, including Ibn Khaldun, negotiated with Timur. After it withdrew, he sacked Damascus on the 17th of March 1401. The Umayyad Mosque burned, and men and women were enslaved. A huge number of artisans were taken to his capital at Samarkand. Many others were slaughtered, and their heads were piled in a field beyond the walls' north-eastern corner. A city square there is still called Burj al-Ru'us, originally the tower of heads. Rebuilt, Damascus remained a Mamluk provincial capital until 1516.

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• 7. Empire to Present

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  On the 21st of September 1516 the Mamluk governor of Damascus fled. On the 2nd of October the sermon at the Umayyad Mosque named Selim I as ruler. The Ottoman sultan entered the city the next day. He stayed three months and left by Bab al-Jabiya on the 15th of December to conquer Egypt. He returned in October 1517 and ordered a mosque, tekkiye and mausoleum at the shrine of Shaikh Muhi al-Din ibn Arabi in al-Salihiyah. Ibn Arabi was a medieval Andalusian philosopher. The complex became the first of the city's great Ottoman monuments. An Ottoman census counted 10,423 households.

  The Ottomans stayed about 400 years, except for 1832 to 1840, when Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt held the city briefly. Damascus was the starting point of one of two great Hajj caravans to Mecca, so the Porte gave it more attention than its size warranted. For most of that time Aleppo had more people and greater commercial weight. In 1559 the Sulaymaniyya Takiyya was completed to a design by the architect Mimar Sinan. It paired a mosque with a khan for pilgrims heading to Mecca. The Salimiyya Madrasa rose beside it soon afterwards. In this period the city was called Sacred Damascus, a title it shared with Jerusalem.

  Shady cafes lined the banks of the Barada early in the 19th century. William Henry Bartlett depicted them in a picture published in 1836, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon wrote a poetical illustration to accompany it. The coffeehouses had an international reputation.

  Ottoman rule had harsher chapters. Christians and Jews were dhimmis, allowed to practise their religions under restrictions. In 1840, during the Damascus affair, members of the Jewish community were falsely accused of ritual murder. In June 1860 violence between Druze and Maronites in Mount Lebanon reached the city, and several thousand Christians were killed. Abd al-Qadir, an exile from Algeria, and his soldiers saved many more. They brought them to his residence and the Citadel three days after the massacre began. The Christian quarter, mostly Catholic, burned down along with several churches. But Muslim neighbours protected the mostly Orthodox Christians of the Midan district.

  The American missionary E.C. Miller recorded about 140,000 people in the city in 1867. They included 30,000 Christians, 10,000 Jews and 100,000 Muslims, with fewer than 100 Protestants. In November 1898 the German emperor Wilhelm II toured Damascus while visiting the Ottoman realm.

  Nationalist feeling in Damascus began as a cultural interest. After the Committee of Union and Progress took power in Istanbul in 1908, it turned political, in reaction to the committee's turkicisation program. In 1915 and 1916 the governor Jamal Pasha hanged a number of patriotic intellectuals in Beirut and Damascus, which stoked that feeling further. In 1918, as Arab Revolt and British forces approached, residents fired on retreating Turkish troops. T. E. Lawrence reached Damascus on the 1st of October 1918, but he was only the third to arrive that day. The Australian 3rd Light Horse Brigade got there first, under Major Harry Olden. On the 3rd of October the forces of the Arab Revolt under Prince Faisal arrived, and Faisal ibn Hussein was declared king of Syria.

  Tension had already grown in November 1917, when the new Bolshevik government revealed the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In it, Britain and France had agreed to carve up the Arab lands of the East between them. A Franco-British proclamation of the 17th of November made a promise. It spoke of the "complete and definitive freeing of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks." In March the Syrian National Congress adopted a democratic constitution. But France held a mandate over Syria, granted at Versailles. In 1920 a French army under General Mariano Goybet marched over the Anti-Lebanon range. It beat a small Syrian defensive force at the Battle of Maysalun and entered Damascus. France made it the capital of its Mandate for Syria.

  The Great Syrian Revolt began in the Hauran in 1925 and spread to Damascus. The French crushed it with heavy weaponry. On the 9th of May 1926 they bombed and shelled the city. The district of the old city between Al-Hamidiyah Souq and Medhat Pasha Souq burned to the ground. It has been known ever since as al-Hariqa, the fire. The reporter George Seldes viewed 308 bodies and suggested the toll might be higher, though no more than 1,000. Barbed wire surrounded the old city, and a new road outside the northern ramparts let armoured cars move.

  On the 21st of June 1941 Damascus fell to a mixed force of British Indian and Free French troops. They took it from the Vichy French, three weeks into the Allied Syria-Lebanon campaign. France agreed to withdraw in 1946, and Syria became fully independent. Damascus remained the capital, even after Ba'athist rule began in 1963.

  By January 2012 fighting between government troops and rebels had reached the edge of Damascus. In June 2012 shells struck homes in the Qaboun neighbourhood. Heavy bombing hit the suburb of Ghouta in December 2017, and another wave began in February 2018. On the 20th of May 2018 the government regained full control of Damascus and all of Rif Dimashq. It was the first time in seven years, following the evacuation of IS from Yarmouk Camp.

  On the 8th of December 2024 rebels led by the HTS group entered Damascus, following a string of offensives. They captured Sednaya Prison, and Ba'athist Syria collapsed. On the 23rd of February 2025 Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called for southern Syria to be fully demilitarized. The provinces he named were Quneitra, Daraa and Suweyda. He also demanded that Syrian forces leave territory south of Damascus. President Ahmed al-Sharaa's new government rejected the demands. Hours later Israel launched a series of airstrikes on Damascus and the south.

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• 8. Faiths and Stones

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  More than 200 mosques are believed to stand in Damascus, and the best known is the Umayyad Mosque. It ranks among the biggest mosques anywhere and is among the longest-running places of unbroken prayer in Islam. Saladin's mausoleum sits in the gardens just outside it. The Sayyidah Ruqayya Mosque nearby honours the youngest daughter of Husayn ibn Ali.

  The Sayyidah Zaynab Mosque shelters the tomb of Zaynab bint Ali and draws many visitors. Shia, Fatemid and Dawoodi Bohra belief holds that the Umayyad caliph Yezid brought Imam Husain's head to Damascus after Karbala in 680 AD. The head was first held in a courtyard of Yezid Mahal, which now belongs to the Umayyad Mosque complex. Surviving members of Husain's family were held as prisoners near Bab al-Saghir. A qibla marks the spot where devotees say Imam Ali-Zain-ul-Abedin prayed during his captivity.

  Most Muslims in the city are Sunni, with sizeable Alawite and Twelver Shi'a minorities. Alawites live mainly in Mezzeh 86, Sumariyah and Eish al-Warwar in Barzeh. Twelvers live around the shrines of Sayyidah Ruqayya and Sayyidah Zaynab. Sufism shaped Sunni practice here through the later decades of the 20th century. Munira al-Qubaysi leads a Sufi-oriented movement for women and girls that is the biggest of its kind in the Muslim world. It is based in Damascus.

  Christians account for between 10 and 15 percent of residents. Several Eastern Christian rites are headquartered here: the Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Melkite Greek Catholic and Greek Orthodox Church of Antioch. The Christian districts are Bab Tuma, Qassaa and Ghassani. The Acts of the Apostles places both Saint Paul and Saint Thomas in Bab Tuma. Roman Catholic historians also consider it the birthplace of several popes, including John V and Gregory III. Followers report a series of appearances of the Virgin Mary in the suburb of Soufanieh between 1982 and 2004.

  Paul's story is written into the streets. Acts 9:11 mentions the Straight Street, the Via Recta, in the account of his conversion. Tradition holds that he escaped through Bab Kisan, let down over the walls in a basket. That gate is now closed and serves as the Chapel of Saint Paul. At the far end of Bab Sharqi Street stands the House of Ananias, a chapel below ground that began as the cellar of his home.

  Harat al-Yahud is the Jewish quarter. It holds the memory of Jewish life in Syria, once far more extensive, reaching back to Roman times at least and perhaps to King David. As of 2023 no Jews remain in Damascus. The quarter was restored and was popular with European visitors before the civil war. A smaller Druze minority lives in the mixed Christian-Druze suburbs of Tadamon, Jaramana and Sahnaya.

  The Old City covers about 86.12 hectares and keeps the rectangular outline of the Roman town, laid out on two axes. The Decumanus Maximus runs east to west and is about twice as long as the north-south Cardo. Its line survives as Bab Sharqi street and the covered Medhat Pasha Souq, named for the Ottoman governor Midhat Pasha, who renovated it. Roman architects fused Greek and Aramaean foundations into a layout of about 1500 by 750 m inside a wall. At the eastern end of the main axis the Romans raised a monumental gate with three arches, the middle one meant for chariots and the others for people on foot. Of the Roman gates, only Bab Sharqi, the eastern gate, remains. Other gates carry evocative names, such as Bab al-Faradis, the gate of the orchards, and Bab al-Salam, the gate of peace.

  Domestic architecture adds more layers. The Azm Palace was built in 1750 as the home of the Ottoman governor As'ad Pasha al-Azm. It now houses the Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions. Bayt Farhi is a large late-18th-century courtyard mansion built for the prominent Jewish Farhi family. In 1976 the Ministry of Culture restored Maktab Anbar, a mid-19th-century Jewish mansion, as a library, exhibition space, museum and craft workshops. Beit al-Mamlouka, a 17th-century house, has served as a boutique hotel since 2005.

  UNESCO listed the Old City as a World Heritage Site in 1979, and it holds over 125 cultural heritage sites. Damascus was the Arab Capital of Culture in 2008. Yet the same period brought alarm. From 1995 to 2009, roughly 30,000 residents left the old city for newer housing, and more and more buildings were abandoned or decayed. In November 2006 the protected buffer zone of Souq al-Atiq was destroyed in three days, against UNESCO's recommendations. In March 2007 the local government announced the demolition of buildings along a 1400 m run of rampart walls. The World Monuments Fund placed the Old City on its 2008 Watch List, a roster of the world's 100 most endangered sites. In October 2010 the Global Heritage Fund listed Damascus among 12 heritage sites "on the verge" of irreparable loss.

  Roman Damascus lies as deep as 5 m beneath the modern streets. Ongoing conflict still threatens the heritage above it and prevents archaeologists from digging down to what remains.

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