Idlib Governorate, Syria — Towns & Travel Guide

What is Idlib Governorate known for?

Millions of trees cover its limestone hills, and the pressed oil has been the region's staple wealth since antiquity. Its greatest draw is the Dead Cities, a scatter of stone-built Byzantine villages abandoned more than a thousand years ago and inscribed by UNESCO as the Ancient Villages of Northern Syria. The city of Idlib gives the governorate its name and its administrative centre.

To the south, Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman carries the memory of the blind poet al-Maʿarri.

Where is Idlib Governorate?

Idlib fills the far north-west corner of Syria. Turkey's Hatay Province closes it off to the north, Aleppo Governorate lies to the east, Hama Governorate to the south, and the Latakia coast rises to the west. The land is a transition. It steps down from the forested mountains of the western littoral toward the drier country that runs on toward the Syrian interior, and Idlib holds the fertile middle ground between the two.

Water and stone define the terrain. Along the western edge the Orontes threads through the Ghab plain, a long depression of alluvial soil that is the governorate's richest farmland. Rising in the south-central districts is Jabal al-Zawiya, a rugged limestone massif of ridges and terraced slopes that once carried the olive wealth of the Dead Cities.

Between plain and massif spread the olive hills. Idlib city stands out on the open plain at the centre, and the towns of Jisr al-Shughur, Ariha and Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman ring it to the west and south.

What is Idlib Governorate like?

Idlib is a land of olive farmers. The pressed oil is more than a crop here; it feeds a soap-making craft the whole northern Levant shares, olive oil cut with the laurel that grows on the coastal mountains to the west. Villages keep the old rhythm of the harvest, and the groves have looked much the same for centuries.

Arabic is the everyday language, in the Levantine speech of the countryside. The deeper culture is written in stone. Across Jabal al-Zawiya the Dead Cities preserve the churches and houses and olive presses that a Byzantine peasantry built and then left, and villages such as al-Bara and Ruweiha still stand roofless on the ridges.

Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman gave the world the poet al-Maʿarri, the blind eleventh-century freethinker whose verse is read far beyond Syria. That inheritance of oil, stone and word runs through the governorate still.

What is the history of Idlib Governorate?

Idlib's past reaches to the dawn of cities. At Tell Mardikh in its south stood Ebla, capital of a Bronze Age kingdom whose palace archive of cuneiform tablets, unearthed in 1975, remains one of Syria's greatest discoveries. Rome and Byzantium later made this olive country rich, and the Dead Cities are what those centuries left behind.

The land passed to Arab, Crusader and Ottoman hands in turn. Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman was stormed during the First Crusade in 1098.

What is the climate of Idlib Governorate?

Idlib has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate. Summers run hot and dry, with the olive and fig country baking under cloudless skies from late spring into autumn. Winters are mild and wet, and nearly all the rain falls between October and April, feeding the rain-fed groves and the fields of the Ghab plain.

Frost is rare. The higher ground of Jabal al-Zawiya stays cooler than the lowland plain around Idlib city.

How do you get to Idlib Governorate?

Idlib has no airport of its own. It sits against the Turkish frontier, and the Bab al-Hawa crossing to Hatay Province is the main gate into the governorate from the north. The M5 highway runs the length of the country past Maʿarrat al-Nuʿman, linking Idlib city with Aleppo to the east and Hama to the south.

Within the governorate, road is the only way, tying the plain towns to Jisr al-Shughur and the ruins of Jabal al-Zawiya.