Vulnerable Cultural Heritage Sites in the Aleppo Governorate

Starting on March 2011, the ongoing Syrian Civil War in the Syrian Arab Republic has threatened and destroyed large quantities of cultural heritage sites along with significant displacement of the Syrian population. According to the U.S. Department of State’s Humanitarian Information Unit, 96% of identified heritage sites across Syria are located inside areas affected by conflict and displacement.

Natural disasters also threaten many of these same sites, as shown by the damage from the 2023 Türkiye-Syria earthquake. UNESCO reported that the earthquake caused a collapse of a wall in a citadel of the Ancient City of Aleppo, which is on UNESCO’s list of World Heritage Sites (Mallard & Kuntz, 2023).

This story map will review which cultural heritage sites in the Aleppo Governorate of the Syrian Arab Republic fall within zones of the highest vulnerability to wildfires, floods, earthquakes, and active conflicts using GIS mapping. This mapping can be used to visualize and interpret potential damage from several sources of hazards for the sites more effectively than working with tables alone.

Current research on the damage to Syrian cultural heritage sites, both from conflict and natural disasters, has included studies by the United States  Humanitarian Information Unit , University of Oxford’s  Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa  program, the  Syrian Heritage Archive , and UNESCO with  UNITAR . The most comprehensive study of the Aleppo region, published as  Five years of conflict: the state of cultural heritage in the Ancient City of Aleppo , uses satellite imagery combined with remote-sensing techniques to evaluate damage to sites.

The cultural heritage site list was collected from University of Oxford’s Endangered Archaeology in the Middle East and North Africa database and UNESCO. The sites were then filtered by the boundaries of the Aleppo Governorate for a more focused and detailed look at the region.

Data on natural disaster risks was gathered from the ETH Zurich Climada database. The tables were created by the organization from both historic disaster data as well as existing factors, such as elevation for flooding and flat areas for wildfire risk. Limitations for comparisons exist due to the averages calculations being created from different ranges of years.

Conflict data was gathered from the Conflict Data Program of Uppsala University. The dataset shows conflict events with fatalities as location points. The dataset is limited to events with fatalities and does not include events with only property destruction. The information is still useful to the research due to regular occurrence of property damage along with events with high fatalities, usually indicating use of explosives and heavy weaponry.

The risk data for earthquakes and wildfires was collected and imported as a grid of points showing risk values. The grids were interpolated using Kriging. The predicted values were then assigned to each specific cultural heritage site point using the GA Layer to Points tool. Using the Attribute Table sorted by the predicted values, the cultural heritage sites (CHS) with the highest twenty values were exported as a separate dataset and labeled as the most vulnerable. These are indicated in the following two maps as the largest circles.

The risk data for flooding was imported as a grid of points that marked vulnerable areas. Clusters were marked for a clearer representation of risk areas, and any cultural heritage site within one kilometer of flood vulnerable points was selected through Select by Location.

The conflict data was imported as point locations signifying recorded locations of conflict events. The points were analyzed using the Optimized Hot Spot Analysis tool and divided using a shapefile for the Aleppo subdistricts. The layer with the cultural heritage sites was assigned values from the hot spot analysis using a Spatial Join.

The results for the risk areas for conflict showed that the majority of the Aleppo Governorate is at significant risk. Flood risk analysis found thirteen sites that are within one kilometer of flood risk areas. Wildfire risk is moderately low across the Aleppo Governorate, with the northeastern corner being an exception. Earthquake risk, in contrast, is moderately high, with the northwestern section of the governorate having the highest risk levels.

Two sites, Tell Akereb and an unnamed archaeological mound site approximately six kilometers northeast of Tell Akereb, fall under the highest vulnerability category of all four hazards. In addition, eight other nearby sites are vulnerable to earthquakes, wildfires, and conflict. The subdistricts containing these sites, al-Zirbah, Hadher, and Tell ad-Daman, are more vulnerable to loss of cultural heritage.

Furthermore, there are two sites in the Aleppo Governorate which are included on the UNESCO list of World Heritage, two of the Ancient Villages of Northern Syria and the Ancient City of Aleppo, and both are present in the most vulnerable areas for conflict. The two ancient villages are additionally vulnerable to earthquakes, and the Qarliq and Karam al-Jabal Mosques of the Ancient City of Aleppo are also predicted to be slightly more vulnerable to wildfires.

Ranking the vulnerability of sites across different types of hazards is limited due to different methods of calculating vulnerability. A weighted analysis is necessary to fully understand the extend of vulnerability of each separate variable on cultural heritage sites.

Studying which sites are the most vulnerable can help focus preservation and restoration efforts on the sites that need it most. This topic is important due to the limited resources available and the large number of cultural heritage sites that are threatened in the Syrian Arab Republic.