Let's start this sobering review with a Fun Fact: Apamea was named after Apamee, the first wife of Seleucid ruler Seleucus I Nicator (c. 358 BC – 281 BC). His second wife, Stratonice, also had a Tentative Site named after her: Stratonikeia. If he had had three wives, that would have made a great connection!

Although it is not as well-known, Apamea comes close to the regional biggies of Ephesus and Palmyra in terms of the importance of its Roman remains. It first blossomed during the Macedonian-Hellenistic Seleucid period, and later became an important Roman provincial capital with 117,000 inhabitants. It was damaged (by earthquakes and wars), rebuilt and restyled many times in its history.

Apamea gained some recent notoriety due to its “lunar landscape of looters’ holes”: evidence of large-scale industrial looting that occurred during the Syrian Civil War, as observed in satellite views by researchers from afar. They were dug by local treasure hunters seeking ancient artifacts when archaeological site protection fell apart. More background on its war history can be found here. From the sky it looked like this:

I shared the image beforehand with my Syrian guide, who had not been to Apamea since the war, and he was shocked. More recent satellite views show that some of the holes are overgrown now, but at the site itself, they still stand out. Directly to the left of the start of the Great Colonnade, we saw a big hole that still held a shovel and a wheelbarrow. That looting is going on til today was confirmed when we met two guys with a metal detector, who wanted to sell us coins that they had found at the site. The site is unsupervised by authorities, a repetitive story for Syrian heritage in 2025.

Apamea’s Great Colonnade, fortunately, is still there, although it has lost 17m of columns on the South Side and 23m at the North. In total, it spanned 1,800m, which is 600m longer than the one in Palmyra. It was the main axis of the Roman city, with important public buildings clustered around it. The colonnade's porticoes were paved with extensive mosaics along the full stretch of the colonnade. Some of its columns are designed as spiral flutes, a rather rare style that was popular for a short period in the Eastern Roman Empire. The walk to the end of the colonnade is actually so long that I did not fully complete it and relied on my superzoom camera to take pictures of what is at the far end.