A continues line of ramparts, marking out a quadrangle 300m wide by 500m long in the hard soil of the steppe at the edge of the desert, is something of an archaeological commonplace in Syria, above all on the approaches to the Euphrates, where so many ruins lie, so many vain glorious monuments returning to dust… The ruins of Rasafah do, however, deserve special attention and more than make up for the thirty bumpy kilometers along a miserable track.

Sergiopolis becomes an Omayyad town

Time and again in this narrow perimeter flanked by towers, destruction and reconstruction, victory and defeat have come and gone. Potentates reigned until they fell, men suffered for their faith, pilgrims came to pay respect to their memory, treasure was amassed, only to be plundered…

It was thus, in particular, that a grandiose basilica came to be dedicated to Saint Sergius, a Syrian officer stationed on the Euphrates, who died for refusing to deny Christ: that was in 305, under Diocletian. The palace of the Ghassanid king Al- Munther shows the influence of the Ghassanid Arabs during the Byzantine epoch, and their domination which went from Aqaba to Rasafah, after he had had palatial summer residences built there, which in their riches were compared with the palaces in Baghdad. But less than six years after his death in 743, the Abbassides desecrated the sculpture of their brother enemy and destroyed every one of the buildings and the monuments he had erected.

Then the city fell prey to exhaustion. It survived for a few centuries more living off the toil of the weaving mills that wove the wool of the countless sheep that were the sole wealth of the stony wasters around.

Rasafah is now nothing but ruins, but the sheep still here. Their wool goes to supply mills at Raqqa or Aleppo. The Bedouin nomads still water their flocks with the brackish water from the open well at the north-west tip of the rampart. What a colorful sight it is to see the swollen water skin drawn up, hauled by a mule or a camel to the accompanying sounds of splashing water, squeaking pulleys and children’s cries! The rope, more than 40 meters long, shows how deep the well is.

A city of crystal

Four fortified gates give access to the town, one in the middle of each side of the rampart. The north gate, though half buried in the sand, is the most finely decorated. The five arches of which it is made up rest on columns with lavish Corinthian capitals. Friezes of fine sculptures follow the line of the architecture. An impression of richness, almost of luxuriance, is created using very sober means. The method is typically Syrian: it is to be found in almost all the "ghost towns" of Northern Syria and is used even more fineness at Qalb Loza and at Qalaat Seman in particular. The exceptional interest of Rasafah lies elsewhere, therefore. Although the north face, always in the shade, has not revealed it, the smallest stone exposed to the sun will draw the visitor’s attention: the city shines with a thousand lights!

The chipped cornices, the edges of the acanthuses or of the sculpted rosettes, the carved or broken blocks, all have the glint of rose crystal. Rasafah was built out of a rose-colored marble encrusted with gypsum; the countless fragments of the shattered city catch the light like so many pieces of quartz-crystal.

Strong buttresses support the defensive wall on the inside. Made of big blocks well bonded together, they allow room for a vaulted passage to serve as a curtain. The tow of arches creates an effect of alternating light and shade and the whole is bathed in a rose-colored glow. Of the city itself, there remains only two or three buildings that can be identified and deserve the attention of the ordinary visitor. All round is desolation; the bare and upturned land is pitted with craters as if it had come under heavy artillery fire whereas all that has really happened are acts of vandalism and all these thousands of holes are the work of generations of shameless treasure-seekers…

Church remains

From the north gate, the Via Recta formed the main thoroughfare of the city. It is now no more than a pathway overgrown with grass, but lining it on either side there are still blocks of marble, the broken stumps of pillars and chunks of wall from the past. The street leads to a first building of some size: the martyrium, a church where, at an early date, the bodies of Saint Sergius and his companions Bacchus and Julia were laid to rest. It is a basilican church with an apse. The floor and walls are made of gypsum stone found in Rasafah and the great monolithic columns are of rose-colored marble. The apsidal chapels are well preserved; the capitals and the archway carved like lace. Unfortunately, the whole structure seems to stand only by a miracle; the keystone has already slipped more than half its height. Clearing, restoration and strengthening us urgently needed if this relic from one of the great periods of Syrian art is not to become a scatter of stones forgotten in the sand.

A hundred meters east of the martyrium stands a larger and more majestic replica of the first church, the great basilica dedicated to Saint Sergius. It has the same logical layout, the same shapeliness, the same pretty decoration and, of course, the same great beauty of the building material. Here, fortunately, some restoration work has already been begun.

Built on to the north wall of the basilica, and perhaps taken from a lateral nave of the Christian building, is a big rectangular, colonnaded hall used as a mosque in the 13^th or 14^th century. Two alcoves made in the church wall became mihrabs. These are both Byzantine and Arab writing which confirm that the two religious, Christianity and Islam, lived side by side at Rasafah right into the Middle Ages.

Close to the great basilica, a breach in the south-east corner of the rampart leads outside the walls to a knoll on which Caliph Hisham built his palace with a square layout and with all the rooms opening on to a vast inner courtyard. Unfortunately, the destruction wreaked by the hatred of the Abbassides for the Omayyads and centuries of erosion of the brick have left little here to fire the imagination.

Beautiful crystalline stone

Returning to the inside of the walls, the visitor will again be delighted at the sight of the crystalline stone, just as remarkable even when reduced to pieces of debris strewn on the ground. Taking a bearing on the tall silhouette of the martyrium, he will then set off towards the south-west district of the city.

Behind the martyrium, several vaulted rooms are to be seen in a building with a central courtyard. This was a pilgrims’ inn. One of the walls bears an enigmatic inscription.

A little further on at ground level are the entrances to two huge cisterns hollowed out of the rock with transverse rib vaults and walls still covered with water-tight cement. Their capacity gives a good idea of the population of Rasafah, Rasafah which is now nothing more than a tiny fragment of crystal glittering in the dreary desert.