Jerash — The Pompeii of the East

Fifty kilometers north of Amman, in a fertile valley of the Gilead hills, stands the ancient city of Gerasa — modern Jerash — widely considered the best-preserved Roman provincial city on Earth. Buried for centuries under sand and successive earthquakes, then gradually excavated from the 1920s onward, Jerash today presents an almost complete Roman urban plan: gates, plazas, twin theatres, two great temple complexes, churches, baths and a hippodrome, all connected by streets still rutted with chariot tracks.

You enter beneath Hadrian's Arch, raised for the emperor's visit in 129 AD, and pass the hippodrome where 15,000 spectators once watched chariot races. The Oval Plaza is unique in the Roman world — an immense egg-shaped forum ringed by 56 Ionic columns — and from it the Cardo Maximus runs 800 meters north, a colonnaded spine lined with the stumps of shops, fountains and the grand Nymphaeum. Climb to the Temple of Artemis, whose columns still sway imperceptibly in the wind on their ancient foundations, and finish in the South Theatre, where the acoustics are so precise a coin dropped on the stage rings clear in the top row.

Every July the ruins come alive for the Jerash Festival of Culture and Arts, when performances fill the ancient theatres just as they did eighteen centuries ago.

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