Ancient City of Palmyra

Palmyra is an exercise in contrast. The ruins rise from the Syrian desert with a theatrical suddenness — one moment you are on a flat dusty road, the next you are walking through a monumental colonnade that stretches into the heat haze. The quality of the stone, a warm honey-coloured limestone, gives the ruins a luminous quality in the afternoon sun that no photograph quite captures, and the scale of the city’s ambition — temples, theatres, baths, a agora — makes clear why it was once described as the Venice of the sands.

The Temple of Bel, dedicated to the Mesopotamian god Bel, was Palmyra’s most important sanctuary and one of the best-preserved Roman temples in the world before the destruction of 2015–2017. Its massive peristyle courtyard, its engaged columns and its elaborate gateway gave the temple a presence that dominated the oasis. What was destroyed has been partially reconstructed, but visitors should approach with awareness that what they see is a site in active recovery.

The colonnaded main street runs for over a kilometre from the Temple of Bel to the Arch of Triumph, and the effect of walking along it is genuinely awe-inspiring. The columns, many of them still topped with their original Corinthian capitals, created a shaded public space that was the commercial and civic spine of the ancient city. The long decay of centuries and the more recent violence has left gaps in the colonnade, but enough survives to give a sense of the original grandeur.

The Tower Tombs on the southwestern edge of the site represent one of Palmyra’s most distinctive contributions to world architecture. These multi-storey burial towers, built for wealthy Palmyrene families, contain elaborate interior chambers with frescoes and inscriptions in both Greek and Aramaic. They stand in a line along the desert edge like a skyline of the dead, and the best of them — the Tower of Elahbel — reaches five storeys.

The theatre in the centre of the city, built into the hillside on the western side of the agora, is modest in scale compared to the great theatres of Greece and Jordan but remains functional and acoustically impressive. The small museum near the site entrance holds finds from the excavation of the site, including a remarkable collection of Palmyrene sculptures and textiles that illustrate the city’s cosmopolitan character as a meeting point of Roman, Greek and Eastern traditions.

Palmyra was occupied and damaged by ISIL/Da’esh between 2015 and 2017, and some monuments were deliberately destroyed. The Syrian army retook the site in 2017 and reconstruction efforts have been underway since, supported by international heritage organizations. The site was added to the UNESCO List of World Heritage in Danger in 2013 and remained there as of 2026.

The Temple of Bel and the colonnaded main street represent one of the best-preserved Greco-Roman urban ensembles in the Middle East.

The tower tombs on the desert edge are an architectural form found almost nowhere else in the Roman world.

Palmyra’s role as a cosmopolitan crossroads of Roman, Greek and Eastern cultures is uniquely visible in its art and inscriptions.