Experts push to restore Syria's war-torn heritage sites, including renowned Roman ruins at Palmyra

Boston Globe

17-02-2025

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Before the Syrian uprising that began in 2011 and soon escalated into a brutal civil war, Palmyra was Syria's main tourist destination, attracting around 150,000 visitors monthly, Ayman Nabu, a researcher and expert in ruins said. Dubbed the 'Bride of the Desert,' 'Palmyra revitalized the steppe,' he said.
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The ancient city was the capital of an Arab client state of the Roman Empire that briefly rebelled and carved out its own kingdom in the third century, led by Queen Zenobia.
In more recent times, the area had darker associations. It was home to Tadmur prison, where thousands of opponents of the Assad family's rule in Syria were reportedly tortured. The Islamic State group demolished the prison after capturing the town.
ISIS militants later destroyed Palmyra's historic temples of Bel and Baalshamin and the Arch of Triumph, viewing them as monuments to idolatry, and beheaded an elderly antiquities scholar who had dedicated his life to overseeing the ruins.
Between 2015 and 2017, control of Palmyra shifted between the Islamic State and the Syrian army before Assad's forces, backed by Russia and Iran-aligned militias, recaptured it. They established military bases in the neighboring town, which was left heavily damaged and largely abandoned. Fakhr al-Din al-Ma'ani Castle, a 16th-century fortress overlooking the city, was repurposed by Russian troops as a military barracks.
Nabu, the researcher, visited Palmyra five days after the fall of the former government.
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'We saw extensive excavation within the tombs,' he said, noting significant destruction by both Islamic State and Assad government forces. 'The (Palmyra) museum was in a deplorable state, with missing documents and artifacts — we have no idea what happened to them.'
At the theater, the Tetrapylon, and other ruins along the main colonnaded street, they documented many illegal drillings revealing sculptures, as well as theft and smuggling of funerary or tomb-related sculptures in 2015 when the Islamic States had control of the site, Nabu said. While seven of the stolen sculptures were retrieved and put in a museum in Idlib, 22 others were smuggled out, Nabu added. Many pieces likely ended up in underground markets or private collections.
Inside the city's underground tombs, Islamic verses are scrawled on the walls, while plaster covers wall paintings, some depicting mythological themes that highlight Palmyra's deep cultural ties to the Greco-Roman world.
Two men stood on the ruins of the Temple of Bal, which was destroyed by ISIS in 2015, at the ancient city of Palmyra, Syria.
Khalil Hamra/Associated Press
'Syria has a treasure of ruins,' Nabu said, emphasizing the need for preservation efforts. He said Syria's interim administration, led by the Islamist former insurgent group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has decided to wait until after the transition phase to develop a strategic plan to restore heritage sites.
The UN's scientific, educational and cultural organization UNESCO, said in a statement that the agency had since 2015, 'remotely supported the protection of Syrian cultural heritage' through satellite analyses, reports and documentation and recommendations to local experts, but it did not conduct any work on site.
In 2019, international experts convened by UNESCO said detailed studies would need to be done before starting major restorations.
Beyond Palmyra, other historical sites bear the scars of war.
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Perched on a hill near the town of Al-Husn, with sweeping views, Crac des Chevaliers, a medieval castle originally built by the Romans and later expanded by the Crusaders, was heavily bombarded during the Syrian civil war.
On a recent day, armed fighters in military uniform roamed the castle grounds alongside local tourists, taking selfies among the ruins.
Hazem Hanna, an architect and head of the antiquities department of Crac des Chevaliers, pointed to the collapsed columns and an entrance staircase obliterated by airstrikes. Damage from government airstrikes in 2014 destroyed much of the central courtyard and the arabesque-adorned columns, Hanna said.
Some sections of Crac des Chevaliers were renovated after airstrikes and the deadly 7.8 magnitude earthquake in 2023 that struck a wide area of neighboring Turkey and also Syria, Hanna said. However, much of the castle remains in ruins.
Both Nabu and Hanna believe restoration will take time. 'We need trained technical teams to evaluate the current condition of the ruin sites,' Nabu said.