58 Fun Facts About Syria

Which popular pet rodent has a common species named after Syria, its wild home?

Hamster owners often keep the golden, or Syrian, species, native to the dry country around Aleppo; a small group caught there in 1930 was bred in captivity, and its descendants spread to homes and laboratories worldwide.

Syria's coastline lies on which sea?

The Mediterranean washes Syria's short coast, where Latakia and Tartus are the main ports; on Arwad island, off Tartus, the Crusaders clung to their last foothold in the Levant until the Mamluks took it in 1302.

Which country borders Syria to the north?

Turkey sent troops across the border in August 2016 and held parts of northern Syria for years, while millions of Syrians fled the other way as refugees during the civil war.

Which rebel group led the lightning offensive that toppled Bashar al-Assad in December 2024?

Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham fighters broke out of their north-western stronghold on 27 November 2024 and took Damascus on 8 December, ending more than half a century of Assad family rule.

Who became Syria's transitional president in January 2025?

Ahmed al-Sharaa, long known by the nom de guerre Abu Mohammad al-Jolani, had a $10 million US bounty on his head until December 2024; weeks after Washington dropped it, he was named transitional president.

Hafez al-Assad overthrew his own party's leadership in November 1970 in a coup known as what?

The Corrective Movement was the name Hafez al-Assad gave his November 1970 coup, which ousted Salah Jadid; he ruled until his death in 2000, when his son Bashar succeeded him.

The Ba'ath Party, which seized power in Syria in 1963, also ruled which other Arab country for decades?

Iraq was ruled from 1968 to 2003 by a rival wing of the Ba'ath, Saddam Hussein's; far from uniting the neighbours, the shared party left the two regimes bitter foes for decades.

From 1958 to 1961 Syria merged with which country to form the United Arab Republic?

Egypt under Gamal Abdel Nasser ran the union and dissolved Syria's political parties; resentment at Egyptian domination led army officers to seize power in Damascus in September 1961 and pull Syria out.

Which European power held the League of Nations mandate over Syria between the world wars?

France was assigned the mandate at the San Remo conference in 1920; that July its troops enforced it by crushing Faisal's short-lived Arab kingdom at the Battle of Maysalun.

The 1916 secret deal carving the Ottoman Middle East into British and French zones is named after which two diplomats?

Sykes and Picot, Britain's Mark Sykes and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot, struck the deal in secret; it came to light in November 1917, when the Bolsheviks took power and published it.

In which script did the scribes of Ugarit write their 14th-century BC tablets?

Cuneiform signs, pressed into clay with a stylus, were adapted at Ugarit into a 30-letter alphabet; the city near modern Latakia was destroyed around 1190 BC in the Bronze Age collapse.

Archaeologists digging at Tell Mardikh, south of Aleppo, in the 1970s unearthed the tablet archive of which Bronze Age kingdom?

Ebla's royal palace was destroyed by fire in the 23rd century BC; its archive of clay tablets, found in 1974-75, revealed a previously unknown Semitic language, now called Eblaite.

Which 3rd-century queen of Palmyra ruled an empire stretching from Egypt into Asia Minor before Rome defeated her?

Zenobia's armies took Egypt and pushed as far as Ancyra before Rome defeated her in 272; most accounts say she was then paraded in a triumph in Rome, though one has her dying on the way there.

Emesa, the Syrian home city of the Roman empress Julia Domna, is known today by which name?

Homs was Roman Emesa, where Julia Domna's family served as priests of the sun god Elagabal; her great-nephew, the emperor Elagabalus, later had the god's black stone carried to Rome.

According to the New Testament, which apostle was converted on the road to Damascus?

Paul, then Saul of Tarsus, was blinded by a light on the way to arrest Damascus Christians (Acts 9) and regained his sight after Ananias laid hands on him in the city.

The Great Mosque of Damascus is traditionally held to contain the head of which biblical figure?

A shrine inside the prayer hall is said to hold the head of John the Baptist; the caliph al-Walid, who reigned from 705 to 715, built the mosque on the site of a church dedicated to him.

Which caliphate made Damascus its capital in the mid-7th century?

The Umayyad caliphs ruled from Damascus after Muawiya took power in 661, governing from Spain to the Indus; the Abbasids overthrew them in 750 and the capital later moved to Baghdad.

Krak des Chevaliers was held until 1271 by which crusading order, later rulers of Rhodes and Malta?

The Knights Hospitaller were given the castle in the 1140s and rebuilt it; the Mamluk sultan Baibars took it in 1271, reportedly using a forged letter from their Grand Master ordering surrender.

Which founder of the Ayyubid dynasty took Damascus in 1174 and ruled Syria until his death there in 1193?

Saladin retook Jerusalem in 1187, letting its Christians buy their freedom instead of repeating the Crusaders' massacre of 1099; he is buried in the old city of Damascus.

Which conqueror sacked Aleppo and Damascus around 1400 and deported the artisans of Damascus to Samarkand?

Tamerlane (Timur) besieged Damascus over the winter of 1400-01; the historian Ibn Khaldun, caught inside, was lowered over the wall by ropes to negotiate with him before the city was sacked.

Under Ottoman rule from 1516, Damascus was the starting point of a great yearly caravan to which city?

Mecca was the goal of the hajj caravan that gathered in Damascus each year; the pilgrim traffic made the city a major entrepot and won it more attention from the sultans than its size warranted.

After Assad's fall, Syria's new flag replaced the old one's two green stars with what?

Three red stars sit on the green, white and black 'independence flag' first used in 1932, which the opposition revived during the civil war; the stars first stood for the districts of Aleppo, Damascus and Deir ez-Zor.

What is Syria's highest point?

Mount Hermon, known locally as Jabal al-Shaykh, rises to 2,814 metres at the southern end of Syria's western mountain border; its snowmelt feeds the springs of the River Jordan.

Which basalt plateau in south-west Syria has Israel occupied since the Six-Day War?

The Golan Heights, about two-thirds of which Israel captured in under 48 hours of fighting, were placed under Israeli law in 1981, and the United States recognised the annexation in 2019.

Which river, Syria's most important, crosses the east of the country on its way to Iraq?

The Euphrates flows south-east past Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor; the Tabqa Dam, completed upstream of Raqqa in 1973, backed the river up into the largest lake in the country.

The villagers of Maaloula, north-east of Damascus, kept which ancient language alive into the 21st century?

Aramaic lived on in Maaloula as Western Neo-Aramaic, shared with two nearby villages; one of them, Bakh'a, was wrecked in the civil war and its people scattered, leaving only Maaloula and Jubb'adin.

The Assad family belongs to which religious minority that came to dominate the army?

Alawites were for centuries a poor and repressed mountain minority; the armed forces, which recruited heavily among minorities under the mandate, became their way up, and by the 1960s Alawite officers held key commands.

Who make up Syria's second-largest ethnic group, about a tenth of the population, living mostly along the northern border?

Kurds were long treated as outsiders: a 1962 census in the north-east stripped some 120,000 of them of citizenship, leaving those families stateless for decades.

Which community grew in Syria as refugees fled the 1915 genocide in the Ottoman Empire?

Armenians were driven on deportation marches into the Syrian desert in 1915-16; survivors and later refugees settled above all in Aleppo, long home to most of the community.

In February 1982 the Ba'athist regime crushed a Muslim Brotherhood uprising with a massacre in which city?

Hama was shelled and stormed for most of February 1982 by forces including Rifaat al-Assad's Defence Companies; estimates of the dead run as high as 40,000, and whole neighbourhoods were flattened.

Syria ended its 29-year occupation of which neighbour in 2005, after Rafic Hariri's assassination?

Lebanon had hosted Syrian troops since they entered its civil war in 1976; after Hariri's killing in February 2005, the mass 'Cedar Revolution' protests in Beirut forced the last of them out that April.

The Syrian reactor destroyed in 2007 was allegedly being built by technicians from which country?

North Korea was identified by US intelligence as the partner behind the al-Kibar reactor, modelled on its Yongbyon plant; Israel only formally admitted the September 2007 strike in 2018.

The 2011 uprising against Assad was part of which wider wave of protests?

The Arab Spring reached Syria in March 2011, when the arrest and torture of teenagers who had painted anti-regime slogans on a school wall in Daraa set off protests that spread across the country.

By May 2015 which group held roughly half of Syria's territory?

Islamic State took Palmyra in May 2015 and ran its self-declared caliphate from Raqqa until a US-led coalition and local ground forces drove it from the city in October 2017.

Which two foreign powers intervened militarily on Assad's side to keep him in power?

Russia and Iran propped up Assad: Iranian-backed militias fought on the ground, and Russian air power from September 2015 helped retake Aleppo in 2016; neither could save him when rebels swept south in 2024.

Under Assad, which illegal drug became Syria's most valuable export?

Captagon pills, sold under the name of a 1960s fenethylline medicine but typically containing amphetamine, were produced industrially in regime-held areas and smuggled to Gulf markets, a trade estimated at billions of dollars a year.

Aleppo soap, an olive-oil bar, is distinguished by the addition of oil from which plant?

Laurel berry oil is cooked with olive oil and lye, then poured out across the factory floor; workers in wooden shoes walk over the cooling slab, and the cut bars are stacked in towers to dry for six months or more.

Historical 'Damascus steel' sword blades were prized for their strength and for what visual feature?

Wavy, water-like patterns on the blades came from crucible 'wootz' steel imported from India, whose carbide banding showed after etching; damascene inlay is a different craft altogether.

The covered Al-Hamidiyah Souq in Damascus ends at the surviving columns of a Roman temple to which god?

Jupiter's temple was one of the largest in Roman Syria; it was later turned into a church and then into the city's great mosque, whose walls were once the temple's inner enclosure.

Yabraq, a Syrian favourite, is rice and minced meat rolled in the leaves of which plant?

Grapevine leaves give yabraq its name, from the Turkish yaprak, 'leaf'; a meatless version is called yalanji, from the Turkish for 'liar' or 'fake', because it only pretends to hold meat.

What is the aniseed-flavoured alcoholic drink traditionally served on special occasions in Syria?

Arak is distilled from grapes and flavoured with aniseed; add water and the clear spirit turns milky white, because the anise oil dissolves in alcohol but not in water.

Ghada Shouaa won Syria's first Olympic gold at Atlanta 1996 when she took which multi-event title?

Heptathlon gold came with 6,780 points for Shouaa, a former national-team basketball player who had taken up athletics seriously only five years before Atlanta.

Syria's national football team is nicknamed after which mountain overlooking Damascus?

Qasioun, the mountain above Damascus, gives the team its nickname, the Qasioun Eagles; forced by the war to play home games in Malaysia, they reached a 2018 World Cup play-off and lost to Australia only in extra time.

Which pen name did the Syrian-born poet Ali Ahmad Said Esber adopt as a teenager?

Adonis was the name he took at 17, after magazines had turned down poems sent under his own; borrowing a god's name was meant to wake up napping editors.

What is the name of Syria's 17 April national day, which marks the departure of the last foreign troops in 1946?

Evacuation Day was first celebrated on 17 April 1946; Syria had already declared war on the Axis and become a charter member of the United Nations in 1945, with the occupying troops still on its soil.

In 1925 Sultan al-Atrash raised a great revolt in the southern mountains around Suwayda, home to which community?

The Druze rose in July 1925 under Sultan al-Atrash and took Suwayda within weeks; news of their victories ignited revolts in Damascus, which the mandate authorities then bombarded.

At which Syrian site did Egyptians and Hittites fight a huge chariot battle in 1274 BC?

Kadesh, on the Orontes, saw Ramesses II claim a victory that was really a draw; about 15 years later he and the Hittite king Hattusili III sealed the oldest peace treaty to survive in both sides' versions.

Which Roman general ended the Seleucid kingdom and made Syria a Roman province in the 60s BC?

Pompey deposed Antiochus XIII, one of the last Seleucid kings, who was then murdered, and annexed what was left of the realm founded by Alexander's general Seleucus.

Which Greek historian of the 5th century BC wrote that 'Syrians' was simply the Greek name for the Assyrians?

Herodotus noted that the people Greeks called Syrians were called Assyrians by others; a bilingual inscription unearthed at Çineköy in 1997 backs the link, using the two names for one land in its two languages.

Which town in southern Syria is famous for a Roman theatre built of black basalt?

Bosra's 2nd-century theatre had a second life as a stronghold: the Ayyubids enclosed it in a fortress, so that towers and walls now wrap around the stage and seating.

Syria's Ramadan 'musalsalat', such as Bab al-Hara, are what kind of television programme?

Soap operas, or musalsalat, are watched by families after the fast is broken each evening of Ramadan; Syrian voices front imports too, since Turkish serials such as Noor were dubbed into Syrian dialect, not formal Arabic.

Which river flows through Damascus and waters the Ghouta oasis that surrounds it?

The Barada rises in the mountains north-west of Damascus and fans out into the Ghouta; it is usually identified with the Abana, which the general Naaman in the Bible boasted was better than all the waters of Israel.

Damascus is poetically known as the city of which flower?

Jasmine, grown over courtyard walls across the old city, gave Damascus the epithet 'City of Jasmine'; Syrians colloquially call the city ash-Sham, the same word used for the Levant.

Which patterned fabric takes its name from Syria's capital?

Damask, a reversible fabric with its pattern woven in, is named after Damascus, the Silk Road trading city credited with first making it; the word has been in English since the Middle Ages.

Which older name for Palmyra, known from Bronze Age letters, is still the name of the modern town beside it?

Tadmor is named in letters from Mari written before 1750 BC, yet the Bible's Book of Chronicles credits Solomon, who lived some eight centuries later, with building it.

Which Roman emperor sacked Palmyra in 273 after the city's second revolt?

Aurelian had spared Palmyra when it surrendered in 272, but when the city revolted again the next year he marched back and sacked it, ending its days as a great trading power.

Which Palmyrene king, whose widow later defied Rome, defeated the Sasanian emperor Shapur I in the 260s?

Odaenathus attacked Shapur's army as it withdrew after capturing the emperor Valerian in 260, then carried the war as far as Ctesiphon, the Persian capital.

Which king of Israel sent chariots to fight beside Damascus at Qarqar in 853 BC?

Ahab is credited in Shalmaneser III's own record with 2,000 chariots; the invader claimed a sweeping victory, yet he went home without following it up.