Jerash

Jerash — the Roman Gerasa — is one of the most extraordinary archaeological sites in the Middle East and arguably the best preserved Roman city in the world after Pompeii and Ephesus. Located 50 kilometres north of Amman, in a green valley of the Gilead hills that descend towards the Jordan, it was in the 2nd century AD one of the ten great cities of the Decapolis, the federation of Greco-Roman cities of the Roman province of Arabia. Under emperor Hadrian (who visited it in 129-130 AD and had the arch which bears his name erected), Gerasa reached its peak: 20,000 inhabitants, two theatres, a hippodrome, ten major temples, monumental baths and the famous Oval Plaza — an elliptical forum surrounded by 56 Ionic columns, a configuration found nowhere else in the Roman Empire.

But it is the state of preservation that makes Jerash exceptional. Destroyed by an earthquake in 749, gradually buried under alluvial sediments and forgotten for eleven centuries, the ancient city remained hidden under wheat fields until its rediscovery by the German explorer Ulrich Jasper Seetzen in 1806. Systematic excavations led since the 1920s have uncovered close to 800 columns still standing, more than 1.2 kilometres of paved cardo maximus, two theatres whose acoustics still work perfectly, and a partially reconstructed hippodrome which today hosts daily historical re-enactments (RACE — Roman Army and Chariot Experience). To visit Jerash is to walk through a real Roman city, not scattered ruins: Hadrian's Arch, the Oval Forum, the Temple of Zeus, the Temple of Artemis and the great colonnade of the main street are connected by a cardo you cover on foot exactly as a 2nd-century Roman would have done. No serious traveller in Jordan should miss this site, which sometimes overshadows Petra for lovers of classical antiquity.