Krak des Chevaliers

Krak des Chevaliers sits on a 650-metre spur at the southern end of Syria's coastal mountains, watching over the Homs Gap, the one easy corridor between the port of Tripoli and the inland city of Homs. The site was already fortified in 1031, when the Mirdasid emir of Aleppo stationed Kurdish troops here, which is why Arabic sources still call it Hisn al-Akrad, the fort of the Kurds. Between 1142 and 1144 Raymond II, Count of Tripoli, handed it to the Knights Hospitaller, and the order replaced the Kurdish fort with a castle of its own. An earthquake in 1170 damaged that first building, and a long 13th-century campaign then wrapped it in a second, outer ring of walls with strongly projecting round towers. The result is a fully concentric castle, and it is the reason the place is so often held up as the finest surviving work of Crusader military architecture.

What sets it apart is how complete the defensive thinking still is. The main approach is a vaulted ramp about 137 metres long that climbs uphill, doubles back on itself in a hairpin and is pierced by murder-holes, so an attacker who missed the turn simply emerged in the killing ground between the two walls. The inner ward rises from a steep masonry glacis, with round towers that once housed the garrison's knights and a southwest tower reserved for the Grand Master. Inside are a chapel, later fitted with two mihrabs when it became a mosque, and a hall of the Knights whose Gothic tracery probably dates from the 1230s. Fragments of Crusader frescoes, rare survivors anywhere, were found under later plaster in 1935, 1955 and 1978. The box machicolations on the outer wall resemble work at the Citadel of Aleppo, a small piece of evidence that ideas travelled between the two sides of the frontier.

At its height in the early 13th century the castle held a garrison of about 2,000 and extracted tribute from Hama and Homs; in 1188 Saladin looked at it and chose to march elsewhere. The end came in 1271, when the Mamluk sultan Baibars brought siege engines, undermined a southwest tower on 29 March and, after a pause, sent in a letter supposedly from the Hospitaller Grand Master permitting surrender. It was a forgery, but the knights left on 8 April. By the 20th century a village of about 500 people had grown up inside the walls; they were moved out in 1933, when the French mandate authorities cleared and restored the castle, and Paul Deschamps' survey of 1934 is still regarded as a model study of a single castle. Since 2006 Krak des Chevaliers has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with Qal'at Salah El-Din. It was shelled in 2012 and hit by air strikes in 2013 during the Syrian civil war, was retaken by government forces in 2014, and has since been under repair and conservation.

Getting there

The castle stands above the village of al-Husn, about 10 km from the town of Tallkalakh and roughly 40 km west of Homs, close to the Lebanese border. The nearest airport is Latakia (LTK), about 78 km away in a straight line.