The Great Colonnade is the surviving backbone of ancient Palmyra — a colonnaded street nearly a kilometre long, lined with hundreds of columns that once carried statues of the city's leading citizens. Much of it survived the ISIS destruction and still gives a sense of the extraordinary scale of this desert city at its height in the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.
The colonnade ran east-west through the heart of the city, lined with shops and markets, connecting the great temple complex of Bel at the eastern end with the civic and religious buildings at the western end. The Tetrapylon — a monumental four-pillar gateway at the colonnade's midpoint — was partially destroyed by ISIS but has since been partially reconstructed using the original stones.