Serjilla

German Wikipedia dates the beginning of the settlement to the mid-4th century and its end to after the 7th century. English Wikipedia gives 473 as the year Serjilla was built; German Wikipedia identifies this as the date (year 784 of the Seleucid era) of a mosaic in the bathhouse. The settlement grew in a natural basin and prospered from grapes and olives; limestone quarrying was also common, sometimes directly beneath buildings. Like most Dead Cities, English Wikipedia says, Serjilla was abandoned in the 7th century after the Arab conquest cut the trade routes between Antioch and Apamea. UNESCO gives the 8th to 10th centuries for the abandonment of the ancient villages as a whole.

Melchior de Vogüé studied the site in the 1860s. Howard Crosby Butler visited with the Princeton expedition in 1899/1900 and again in 1904/05; according to English Wikipedia the floor mosaic the team found had disappeared by the time it returned.[1][2][4]

At the centre stand two 5th-century buildings side by side: an andron, a meeting and guest house for men with a two-storey colonnaded portico and capitals of the type Butler called “Syrian”, and a bathhouse. The bath mosaic shows a pomegranate tree; an inscription names Julianos and his wife Donna as donors. The northern part held lounge and changing rooms, the southern part warm and cold baths.

Numerous two-storey houses of limestone blocks, some with porticoes and cornices (such as House no. 18, probably late 5th century), reflect the community's wealth; behind one villa is a sunken building with an olive press. Of the three-aisled basilica, dated by Butler to the mid-5th century, only parts of the apse, the martyrium and the south facade survive.[1][2]

Arabic Wikipedia describes the inhabitants as farmers who combined agriculture, livestock and olive-oil production, spoke Syriac, knew Greek and converted from paganism to Christianity. UNESCO values the ancient villages of northern Syria as testimony to rural life in late Antiquity and to the spread of Christianity in village communities. The property was inscribed in 2011 and has been on the List of World Heritage in Danger since 2013; English Wikipedia instead gives 2011 for the danger listing.[1][3][4]

According to English Wikipedia, refugees lived in the ruins from 2012 to 2015, building ovens and a toilet and causing minor damage. In the western part a military platoon used ruins as quarters and added tin roofs. In May 2019 three missiles struck the western part; a house converted into a guest house in 2011 lost its roof.[1]