Apamea

The Great Colonnade of Apamea runs for nearly two kilometres in a straight line from the north gate to the south gate of the ancient city, one of the longest colonnaded avenues of the Roman world. Many of its nine-metre columns are carved with spiral fluting, twisting up the shaft. The ruins overlook the Ghab valley in north-western Syria, next to the town of Qalaat al-Madiq, whose castle stands on the old acropolis.

The city began as Pella, a Macedonian military colony founded in the wars that followed Alexander's death. Around 300 BC Seleucus I Nicator fortified it and renamed it after his Bactrian wife Apama. Protected by a loop of the Orontes, lakes and marshes, it became the capital of the region of Apamene. Rome annexed it in 64 BC, when Pompey razed its fortress. A census of AD 6 counted 117,000 citizens. When the earthquake of AD 115 flattened much of the city, it was rebuilt over the following century, beginning with the colonnade itself. Along the avenue stood baths, an agora, a temple of Tyche, a nymphaeum and later churches. The theatre, cut into a hillside over the Orontes valley, was rebuilt with the patronage of Trajan and Hadrian. With an estimated capacity of more than 20,000, it ranks with the theatre at Ephesus among the largest of the Roman Empire. Apamea was also a city of thinkers: the Stoic Posidonius and the philosophers Numenius and Iamblichus are associated with it.

In the early 5th century Apamea became capital of the province of Syria Secunda. A synagogue with a mosaic floor of about 391, naming its donors in 19 inscriptions, was later replaced by a church. The governor's palace yielded the Great Hunting Mosaic of 415–420, some 120 square metres; Emperor Justinian restored parts of the colonnade and raised a monumental four-columned tetrastylon on it. Sasanian armies sacked the city in the 6th and early 7th centuries. After the Muslim conquest it lived on as Afamiya, was taken by the Crusader Tancred in 1106, and was finally destroyed by the earthquake of 1152. A reconstructed section of the colonnade and the hunting mosaic, found in 1935, are now in the Art & History Museum in Brussels.

Getting there

The site lies beside Qalaat al-Madiq, about 55 km north-west of Hama; the small town of Kafr Zita is about 19 km away. The nearest airport is Latakia International Airport (LTK), about 41 km away in a straight line on the other side of the coastal mountains.