Hama & Qasr ibn Wardan - Notes

Hama is a green and pleasant little city on the Orontes River with a delightful atmosphere which belies it's rather bloody recent history. It was here in 1982 that a rebellion by militant fundamentalists of the Muslim Brotherhood group tried to stage an uprising against the Assad regime - which they regarded as too western facing. Assad sent his brother Rifa'at, then head of the army, to put down the insurrection. In the bombing and executions that followed large areas of the city were flattened and as many as 25,000 civilians are thought to have been killed. Passing through Hama now it is hard to imagine any of this ever having taken place - the government has clearly invested heavily in rebuilding in the hope that the people of Hama may learn to forget. How successful this has actually been is impossible for an outsider to say but there certainly isn't any sense of tension and the town nowadays is a popular holiday destination for Syrian families. The main attraction of the city for a tourist, apart from its suitability as a base for trips to the surrounding hills, are the enormous water wheels or norias which emit a constant groaning noise audible everywhere when the river is in it's spring floods.

Qasr ibn Wardan and El Anderin, about 75km and 90km northeast of Hama were both defensive outposts of the Byzantine empire built under the Emperor Justinian in the middle of the 6th century. Of El Anderin, very little remains above the ground but at Qasr ibn Wardan the magnificent palace and church are still in a good state of preservation and are of considerable architectural interest with their bands of typically Syrian cyclopean basalt blocks alternating with courses of standard sized Byzantine bricks. In spite of its splendour, Qasr ibn Wardan is not really on the tourist circuit yet (both times I went I had the place to myself) but the invariably helpful manager at the Cairo Hotel in Hama can arrange transport (there are no buses and the road doesn't really go anywhere so don't even think about hitching).