Tartus
We were going from Tartus to Latakia and the main attraction of the day was Saladin Castle. Nobody knows when the first castle was built but when Alexander the Great invaded Syria in 333 BC, the castle was already there. It went through a number of historic stages: Byzantine, Crusaders and Arab-Islamic, and a series of reconstructions and extensions. The Castle sits on a triangular-shaped rock. To get to it one has to climb 142 steps as we did and counted each and every of them.
The Castle was under the Byzantine control until the arrival of the Crusaders. They built additional impregnable defenses and cut a passage through the rock to make it inaccessible from the east side.
The Crusaders occupied the Castle for 70 years until Sultan Saladin’s arrival in 1188 AD. His attempts to take the castle were unsuccessful. After a several-day siege, Saladin offered the defenders a deal: “The Sultan ordered that themselves and their money would be safe and to take 10 dinars for each man, 5 dinars from each woman, and 2 dinars from each child.” Thus, the Castle was spared.
We stopped a number of times on the road at military checkpoints. The soldiers were friendly and smiling. They never entered the bus, only looked at the passenger list with signatures and stamps. Sometimes they kept a copy of it, for that purpose our guides printed a stack of such copies, but usually they just glanced at the list, asked our guides something in Arabic and let us go.
After a winding road back to the coast, we had dinner in Latakia and checked into Royal Palace Hotel. As the name suggests, it was an upgrade from Royal Inn Hotel in Tartus.
