QANAWAT

QANAWAT

Our plans having been thwarted on the northward-bound trip to Homs and Tartous, we decided to head south once again on the last excursion of these Eid holidays, so we took the same road towards Shahba but, instead of entering the town, we continued further south towards Suweida which is the provincial capital of the Suweida district. There are few ruins to be seen in Suweida itself, but they do have an important museum  where many items that were taken from other sites, including Shahba, are on display.

The black basalt museum building is quite modern and fairly well maintained.  There is a large number of exhibits including statues, pottery and lintels with inscriptions in either Greek or Latin.  Given the hardness of the basalt stone, it is amazing how refined the sculptures are with fine detailed work.  I particularly liked a statue of a horse and several Winged Victories where the folds of the clothing are carved beautifully.  The carved heads showing the close curls of the people are also fine and the sculptures of eagles are so true to life that you can tell which are booted eagles and which snake eagles and so on.  Two exhibits caught my eye.  One was a chart (financed by TOTAL which financed a great deal of the work carried out by French archeological teams) showing the various alphabets of antiquity with the phonetic value alongside.  Another was an example of the doors of the dwellings and tombs of the Hauran which were carved out of solid basalt rock all in one piece including the stone hinges which then fitted into a depression in the doorway.  I had read about these doors but this was the first example I had seen.  There are also fine mosaics taken from other sites and displayed on the walls, but I preferred the mosaics at Shahba which could be seen in situ on the floor just as they had been.

We then continued along the road for four kilometres to Qanawat, which means canals in Arabic, where there are a number of remains to be seen.  Qanawat is an ancient site going back to the first century B.C.  In 1A.D., during the reign of Herod Agrippa, it is  mentioned as being in an area infested with brigands.  During the Byzantine period Christianity flourished in Qanawat, as it did elsewhere in the Hauran, but once the area fell to the Islamic forces in the seventh century it entered a period of decline, and by the mid-19th. century was virtually deserted.  The present population, as at Shahba and most of the surrounding locations, are Druze immigrants from the Lebanon.  

The surroundings of the village are pleasant with olive groves and other trees.  The main ruin is called the Seraya and is Roman in origin, the orientation at that time being north-south.  Later, however, the building was adapted to form two basilicas and for religious reasons they were re-oriented so that the altar would face eastwards. There is a row of imposing columns at the southern end of the building and at one end a tower which was a later addition following the fashion for towers in the monastic tradition of northern Syria.

Inside we met two families, one from Hama just north of Homs where we had been a couple of days before who had come to visit friends at Qanawat.  The wives were sitting on a fallen column under a large olive tree and the children had to come and have a look at Simon.  When we had seen the ruins, we also sat for a while in the shade of the olive tree because the ruins had a nice feel about them.  The contrast between the heavy dark basalt constructions of the Hauran and the light, graceful elegance of Palmyra could not be more marked.

One of the interesting points we saw there was the depressions either side of the door entrances where the stone hinges of the stone doors would have been.  At the back of the northern basilica we even saw a window shutter made of stone, with its stone hinges intact, which must have come from the windows above the door. None of the doors or shutters was in place, however.  I am looking forward to finding a site with one in place to see how they open and close.  The very fact that they had such doors and windows indicates great mastery of building techniques and particularly of the plumb line because, if the wall should be out of plumb, then the doors which weigh tons simply would be impossible to move.

We then found the small Temple of Zeus with a number of columns standing.  This ruin was being surveyed and plotted by a group of students from a German university who were working very hard and meticulously.  After that we had an ice-cream at a little shop just opposite.


There are several other ruins including a small theatre at Qanawat but I had forgotten my glasses and Robert is simply hopeless having no patience for reading the meticulous instruction of how to get to such places, so we headed back to Shahba, a town we liked, to buy some fruit and other supplies which are considerably cheaper in these little towns than in Damascus, or at least the part of Damascus where we live.

Having seen photographs of the inside of the crater of the Tell Shihan volcano which overlooks Shahba at the Suweida museum, we have decided to try and climb the volcano early one morning to see what it is like.  Such an excursion will have to be in the early morning because the sun now gets very hot very early.

April 11th. 1998