Hama sits at the centre of a region extraordinarily rich in ancient sites. Within an hour's drive in almost any direction lie Roman cities, Byzantine palaces, and Crusader castles. The three destinations below are the most rewarding, and each represents a different chapter in the long history of the Syrian interior. Note that road access and site conditions have been severely affected by the conflict since 2011; these descriptions reflect the sites as they were before the war.
Apamea (Qalaat al-Mudiq) — About 55 km northwest of Hama, Apamea was one of the great cities of the ancient world. Founded by Seleucus I Nicator — one of Alexander the Great's generals, who named it after his Persian wife Apama — it grew into a city of perhaps half a million inhabitants at its peak in the Roman period. The defining sight is the cardo maximus, the main colonnaded street, which stretches for nearly two kilometres in an almost unbroken line of Corinthian columns. It is one of the longest colonnaded streets surviving from the Roman world. The columns were toppled by the catastrophic earthquake of 1138 AD but re-erected by Syrian archaeologists in the 20th century; some are still twisted in place from the original seismic event. At the northern end of the site stands the hilltop citadel of Qalaat al-Mudiq, a Crusader fortress built over earlier fortifications, from which the whole of the Orontes valley spreads below. A small museum at the site held one of the finest collections of Roman floor mosaics in Syria, including pieces salvaged from the city's many villas.
Qasr ibn Wardan — About 60 km northeast of Hama, across the semi-arid basalt plain of the Syrian interior, stands a cluster of Byzantine buildings that look as though they were airlifted from Constantinople. The church, palace, and barracks of Qasr ibn Wardan were built in the 560s AD, during the reign of the Emperor Justinian, using cut stone and brick shipped at enormous expense from the capital. They were a forward military post and administrative centre on the eastern frontier of the Byzantine Empire — the desert edge where the Roman world met the Persian. The yellow limestone and red brick of the buildings, combined with Byzantine capitals and decorative motifs identical to those found in Constantinople, make Qasr ibn Wardan an anomaly in the Syrian landscape: an outpost of a distant empire that looks completely out of place and is all the more striking for it. The church is partially standing; the palace ruins are more fragmentary but the scale of the original complex is legible.
Asriyeh — A smaller and less visited site, Asriyeh lies in the countryside north of Hama and contains the remains of a Roman temple in a rural setting. The structure is thought to date from the 2nd or 3rd century AD. Unlike the grand excavated sites of Apamea or Palmyra, Asriyeh retains the quality of an accidental discovery — columns and carved blocks half-submerged in agricultural land, the kind of ruins that travellers in the 19th century encountered throughout the Syrian countryside before systematic archaeology removed them to museums or tourist circuits. It rewards visitors willing to seek it out.