16 September 2009

Desert castles

Back in Amman, after a joyful and pleasant summer in Sweden.
During the weekend we decided to, once again (it’ almost a year since last time) to find some of the desert castles. Which actually not are castles, in a general meaning.
When we found the way out of Amman and reached the big road to Iraq and Saud Arabia, we had no problem to find two of the castles.
The first one, Qasr Al-Harrana, was probably built in 710 AD. It contains more than sixty rooms and they think it was built like an inn, and could give people shelter when they were travelling.
Next castle we came to was Quseir Amra and was on the World Heritage list. This building was used as a hunting pavilion for the ruling family.

The most outstanding here are the richly decorated walls with figurative murals “that reflect the secular art of that time”, the information board says.
Then we wanted to return back to Amman before the Ramadan rush in traffic started. We were not lucky …..

1 comment:

  1. Interesting and confusing...
    Is the first castle/inn still in use? Sixty rooms are quite a number of rooms, I mean...
    //Ellinor

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