Bosra

Bosra appears in Egyptian records of the second millennium BC, but it became a city under the Nabataeans, whose kingdom reached north from Petra across the Hauran, and who made it an important northern centre. When Rome annexed the kingdom in 106 AD, the emperor Trajan made Bosra the capital of the new province of Arabia, renamed it Nova Traiana Bostra and garrisoned it with a legion. The town was rebuilt on a grid of colonnaded streets, with baths, a hippodrome, monumental gates and the theatre, all in the black basalt that the volcanic plain supplies in place of limestone. A road, the Via Nova Traiana, ran south from here to the Red Sea, and caravans from Arabia unloaded in its markets.

Christianity came early and Bosra became a metropolitan see, with a large domed cathedral built in the sixth century. Muslim tradition connects the town with the monk Bahira, said to have recognised the young Muhammad among a Meccan caravan here. Under Islamic rule Bosra remained a station on the pilgrim road from Damascus to Mecca, and the mosque now known as al-Omari is among the oldest to survive in Syria.

From the 11th century rulers of Damascus fortified the theatre, filling its vaults and wrapping it in towers until the whole building became a citadel, which is why it survived so completely. The pilgrim road later shifted west, and Bosra shrank into a village living inside the ruins. Excavation and restoration began in the 20th century, UNESCO listed the site in 1980, and a summer festival used the theatre before 2011. Syria's World Heritage Sites, Bosra among them, have since been placed on the list of World Heritage in Danger because of the armed conflict.

Bosra belongs to the Hauran, a Sunni farming and tribal region where clan ties, hospitality and reputation carry great weight, and where the Druze villages of Jabal al-Arab begin a short distance to the north-east. Households are large and extended, marriages are often within the wider family, and disputes have traditionally been settled by elders as much as by courts. Guests are served bitter cardamom coffee in small cups, poured from a long-spouted dallah, and refusing the first cup is normal politeness rather than rejection.

Life in Bosra is unusual in that the town has never stopped living inside its ruins: houses, courtyards and animal pens were built from Roman blocks for centuries, and although archaeological work has cleared much of the ancient centre, the boundary between monument and neighbourhood is still blurred. That long habitation shaped a strong local identity, and the theatre — used for performances rather than kept as an empty shell — has been a source of pride.

Basalt gives everything its character. The stone is cut for walls, lintels, window grilles and even doors, it darkens the streets, and it sets the town apart from the limestone towns of western Syria. Weddings bring out the dabke line dance and drumming in the courtyards, and the calendar follows the Islamic year, with Ramadan evenings and the two Eids the main occasions for visiting relatives across the plain.

Bosra is a small town of roughly 20,000 people, though the figure has moved sharply with displacement during and after the war. Most households depend on farming the Hauran plain — wheat, barley, lentils, olives and vegetables — or on work in Daraa and Damascus, in the army and public service, or with relatives sending money from the Gulf and Jordan. Tourism employed a number of families before 2011 and has not returned in any comparable form.

The plain around the town is open and treeless, with black stone villages spaced across grain fields, and water has always been the constraint: the Romans built cisterns and a great reservoir here, and modern supply is intermittent. So is electricity, and generators, batteries and solar panels are common. Fuel prices and the cost of bread dominate household conversation, as they do across Syria.

The day begins before dawn in summer, when work in the fields is done early, and the middle of the day is quiet. Shops reopen in the late afternoon and men gather in cafés or on the street outside, while the evening belongs to family visiting. Friday is the day of rest, with midday prayers at the old mosques. The return of displaced families, the state of the roads and the security situation in the south are the everyday concerns.

Hauran cooking is grain, pulse and dairy food, plainer than the cuisine of Damascus and generous in quantity. Bread comes from the district's own wheat and appears at every meal; burghul (cracked wheat) is cooked with lentils as mujaddara or shaped into kibbeh; and freekeh, green wheat roasted while still soft, is simmered with chicken or lamb. Lentil soup, fava beans and dishes of rice and vegetables in tomato sauce fill out the week.

Sheep and goats supply the rest. Yoghurt is drained into labneh and served with olive oil at breakfast, dried into hard balls of jameed for winter, or cooked into the yoghurt stews of the region; mansaf, lamb cooked in such a sauce and served over rice and bread, is the festive dish of the whole area straddling the Jordanian border. Meat otherwise means grilled kebabs or a whole animal roasted for a wedding or a guest of standing.

Olives, olive oil, thyme and sesame come together as za'atar, eaten with bread and labneh in the morning or baked on manakish flatbreads. Vegetables from the plain — tomatoes, aubergines, courgettes stuffed with rice and meat — dominate summer meals, and figs, grapes and apples come down from the Druze highlands in late summer. Tea is drunk very sweet through the day, coffee is bitter and scented with cardamom, and sweets are bought rather than made at home, usually from Daraa or Damascus.