A contractor digging into the earth where the rubble of a destroyed house had been cleared away in northern Syria stumbled across a surprise: the remains of an underground Byzantine tomb complex believed to be more than 1,500 years old. As the AP reports, the discovery emerged last month in the town of Maarat al-Numan in Idlib province, which is strategically located between Aleppo and Damascus. The community became a touchpoint in the nearly 14-year Syrian civil war that ended with the fall of former President Bashar al-Assad in December. Assad's forces seized the area back from opposition control in 2020. Houses were looted and demolished. Aerial images show many houses still standing but without roofs.
Now residents are beginning to return and rebuild. In the course of a reconstruction project, stone openings were uncovered indicating the presence of ancient graves. Residents notified the directorate of antiquities, which dispatched a team. Aboveground, it's a residential neighborhood with rows of cinder-block buildings, many of them damaged in the war. Next to one of those buildings, a pit leads down to the openings of two burial chambers, each containing six stone tombs. A cross is etched into one stone column. "Based on the presence of the cross and the pottery and glass pieces that were found, this tomb dates back to the Byzantine era," said Hassan al-Ismail, director of antiquities in Idlib. Idlib "has a third of the monuments of Syria, containing 800 archaeological sites," al-Ismail said.
In the past, the owners of sites where archeological ruins were found sometimes covered them up, fearful that their property would be seized to preserve the ruins, said Ghiath Sheikh Diab, a resident of Maarat al-Numan who witnessed the moment when the tomb complex was uncovered. Another local resident, Abed Jaafar, came with his son to explore the newly discovered tombs and take pictures. "In the old days, a lot of foreign tourists used to come to Maarat just to see the ruins," he said. "We need to take care of the antiquities and restore them and return them to the way they were before … and this will help to bring back the tourism and the economy."
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