We Visit an Abandoned Syrian Village

The Golan Heights is an area at the very North of Israel that borders with Syria. It's steep and mountainous and provides an excellent view of the Sea of Galilee and the surrounding area. When it was still part of Syria, the Syrians would occassionally rain missiles and sniper fire down on the Israeli settlements in the Galilee. As a result, in the 1967 war, the Israelis quickly moved to capture the Golan Heights. Not long afterwards, the area was annexxed to Israel. Some of the local people remained and continue to be grudging citizens of the Jewish state. In other cases they left, leaving behind a few remote outposts. It's certainly tragic to see a place where people once lived and then abandoned. Such ghost towns do make for interesting pictures and here are some we took when we visited one. In the case of this old village, the roofs of some of the oldest houses are gone and all that remains are the old rock walls surrounded by thick vegetation.

This house was perched on the edge of the cliff, providing excellent views from its windows, which I will show below.

As I noted, these old abandoned homes make a good setting for interesting pictures.


Here is the view from the windows of the cliff house pictured above. Through them you can see the hills of the Golan with the Sea of Galilee in the background.

This area also features lots of water which leads to thick vegetative growth with lots of flowers.

Here are the remains of a collapsed reinforced concrete roof. Notice how the steel reinforcement bars are twisted up like spaghetti. Those pockmarks in the lower left look like bullet holes. Who put them there? With all the bullets that have flown around the Golan it's impossible to say.