Demo site — Arsu Tours is not a real company. Nothing here can be booked. What this is
One of the world’s oldest continuously inhabited cities, rebuilding souq by souq
Mamluk stonework with muqarnas corbelling on a tower in Aleppo. Photo by Ahmad Sofi on Unsplash · Unsplash Licence
The hardest place to see honestly and the most rewarding. We walk the souq where re-roofing is finished, the streets where it is not, and sit a full afternoon at a marquetry bench in Jdeideh.
Aleppo’s Old City took major damage between 2012 and 2016, and then took more in the February 2023 earthquake, which cracked defensive walls, collapsed a tower of the Old City wall and part of the Citadel’s Ottoman mill, and weakened khans across the souq.
What is happening now is not a restoration in the sense of a single project with a ribbon at the end. It is section by section: one stretch of Al-Madina Souq re-roofed and trading, the next still shut. Going honestly means seeing both, which is the only reason to go at all.
Aleppo soap — sabon ghar, laurel and olive oil, cured six to nine months and hand-stamped — was inscribed on UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage list in December 2024.
Condition notes are given for each site, including where something was destroyed or is closed. They are the point of this page.
The fortified mound at the centre of the city, and the thing every photograph of Aleppo is taken from or of.
Partially restored; reopened after the southern tower and entrance were stabilised. The 2023 earthquake did further damage.
Its free-standing 11th-century minaret collapsed in 2013. Reconstruction has been running since, using catalogued original stone where it could be recovered.
Functioning as a mosque; briefly reopened for public prayer during Ramadan in March 2025. Work continues.
Kilometres of covered market. Some of it is trading again under a new roof; some of it is still closed.
Partially restored and active in several sections, closed in others.
Merchant caravanserais around the souq, built for exactly the trade Arsu was invoked to protect.
Mixed — some stabilised and accessible, others still under repair.
The historic Christian quarter of stone lanes and courtyard houses, and where the marquetry workshops are.
Largely restored; the cathedral is an active place of worship.
Major war damage 2012–2016, then further structural damage in the February 2023 earthquake. Restoration is running section by section rather than site-wide.
Aleppo International Airport has resumed limited service. Access is reopening but uneven and changes quickly — check current government advisories rather than relying on any blanket statement.
Aleppo soap, cured for six to nine months in the soap khans. Aleppo pepper. And kebab karaz — kebab in sour cherry sauce — which belongs to this city and nowhere else.
