An oasis city watered by the Barada river and among the oldest continuously inhabited places on earth — ruled in turn by Aramaeans, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, made the capital of the Umayyad Caliphate that ruled from Spain to India, and today the contested capital of Syria.
Damascus is among the oldest cities on earth that has never stopped being a city. People were living in its green oasis, watering gardens from the Barada river, by the third millennium BCE. Empires arrived, ruled, and vanished, and the city outlasted every one of them. For ninety years it was the capital of an empire that stretched from Spain to the borders of China. The question this place forces is simple and hard: what does it take for a city to survive five thousand years?