travel

Volubilis (UNESCO 1997) is the best-preserved Roman provincial city in the Maghreb, on the Zerhoun plain 33 km from Meknès in Morocco. Its 40-plus in-situ floor mosaics — the largest such collection in northwest Africa — survive in the rooms of the houses where they were originally laid. The city was capital of the Roman client kingdom under Juba II (married to Cleopatra Selene II) and later the first seat of the Idrisid dynasty, founders of the Moroccan royal line.

Itchan Kala, the walled inner city of Khiva (UNESCO 1990), is the most completely preserved medieval Central Asian city in existence — 10 hectares of mud-brick architecture including the unfinished Kalta Minor, the 213-column Juma Mosque and the 163-room Tosh-Hovli Palace. Unlike Samarkand and Bukhara, Khiva’s medieval urban fabric survives intact, including its street pattern and residential quarters. The city served as the Silk Road’s last active slave market until Russian conquest in 1873.

Göbekli Tepe, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2018, is a 11,600-year-old ritual complex built by Neolithic hunter-gatherers on a limestone hilltop in southeastern Turkey. Its T-shaped limestone pillars — up to 5.5 metres tall and 20 tonnes each, decorated with bas-reliefs of foxes, vultures and snakes — predate Stonehenge by 6,000 years. The site overturned the established view that monumental architecture follows agriculture, suggesting instead that communal ritual may have driven the agricultural revolution itself.

The Pre-Hispanic City and National Park of Palenque, UNESCO-inscribed in 1987, reached its artistic peak under Pakal the Great (r. 615–683 CE) and K’inich Kan Balam II (r. 684–702 CE); the Temple of the Inscriptions (7 platforms, 23 m tall) covers the royal crypt discovered in 1952 by Alberto Ruz Lhuillier, with its 620-glyph inscription panels — the longest Maya stone text known.

Nemrut Dağ, inscribed by UNESCO in 1987, holds the funerary monument built by King Antiochus I of Commagene (r. c. 69–36 BCE) on a 2,134 m summit in southeastern Turkey — a 50 m tumulus flanked by terraces of colossal limestone statues, 8–9 m tall, of the king enthroned alongside syncretised Greek-Persian deities; earthquakes have toppled all the statues and their giant heads now rest on the terrace floors.

Hattusa, the Hittite capital inscribed by UNESCO in 1986, reached its peak in the 14th–13th centuries BCE as a city of 50,000 with 6–8 km of walls; its cuneiform archive produced the Treaty of Kadesh (1259 BCE), the world’s oldest surviving peace treaty, a copy of which hangs in the United Nations in New York. The rock sanctuary of Yazılıkaya, 1 km from the main site, preserves 63 carved relief figures of Hittite gods in the most complete divine procession known from the ancient world.

The Ruins of Ani (UNESCO 2016), located in Kars Province, eastern Turkey, preserve the medieval Armenian Bagratid capital founded in 961 CE — a city of up to 200,000 inhabitants at its peak, centered on the Cathedral of Ani (989–1001 CE) designed by the architect Trdat, who also repaired the dome of Hagia Sophia after the earthquake of 989 CE; the city was abandoned definitively after Mongol sackings and the earthquake of 1319 CE.

The Old Town of Galle and its Fortifications (UNESCO 1988) is the best-preserved European colonial sea fortress in South and Southeast Asia — a 90-hectare Dutch VOC walled town built in coral and granite after 1640 CE, enclosing 14 bastions, 2.5 km of ramparts, and the intact 17th-century street grid including the Groote Kerk (1755 CE), the oldest Protestant church still standing in Sri Lanka.

The Ancient City of Polonnaruwa (UNESCO 1982) served as Sri Lanka’s second capital from 1017 CE, reaching its zenith under Parakrama Bahu I (1153–1186 CE) who built the 8 km² Parakrama Samudra reservoir and commissioned the Gal Vihara rock-cut Buddhas — four colossal figures carved from a single granite outcrop, including a 15-metre reclining parinirvana image that remains one of the masterworks of South Asian sculpture.