Syria observes Eastern European Time: UTC+2 in winter, UTC+3 during daylight saving. The IANA identifier is Asia/Damascus.

Damascus sits at 36.3 degrees East longitude and 33.5 degrees North latitude. Solar noon occurs around 09:55 UTC, which at UTC+2 places local noon at 11:55. A close alignment.

Syria observes DST, though the transition dates have varied over the years with the timezone’s administration. Historically Syria moved clocks forward in late March and back in late October.

The oldest city in the world

Damascus has a credible claim to being the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world. Archaeological evidence of settlement in the Damascus Oasis dates to at least 6300 BCE. The city appears in ancient Egyptian records. It was capital of the Aramaean Kingdom, then part of Assyrian, Persian, and Greek empires, then Roman, Byzantine, and Arab.

The Umayyad Mosque, built in 705 CE on the site of a Christian cathedral that had itself been built on the site of a pagan temple, compresses this history into one location. The bones of John the Baptist are said to be in a shrine within the mosque.

Time in Damascus is measured in millennia.

DST during conflict

Syria’s civil war began in 2011 following the Arab Spring protests, when the government of Bashar al-Assad responded to demonstrations with military force. The conflict drew in regional and global powers, including Russia, Iran, Turkey, the United States, and various proxy forces.

At the height of the conflict, different parts of Syria were controlled by different factions: the Syrian government, the Islamic State in parts of the east and north, Kurdish forces in the northeast, and various other armed groups.

In a country where different areas were governed by different armed actors, the question of which authority to follow on DST transitions became genuinely contested. Areas under government control followed government time. Areas under other control followed their own practices or simply ignored the transitions.

The IANA database continued to record Syria’s official DST transitions based on Damascus government announcements, as it does for all countries: it records official state time, not the time actually in use in areas outside state control.

The Silk Road hub

Before the modern period, Damascus was one of the most important commercial cities in the Middle East. The Silk Road’s western terminus, or one of them, was in the Levant. Caravans from Central Asia and China arrived in Damascus with silk, spices, and other goods.

The Souq al-Hamidiyeh, the covered marketplace that still operates in Damascus’s old city, is the descendant of thousands of years of commercial exchange in this location. The measurement of time in the old souq was organized around prayers and market hours rather than a clock on the wall.

For developers

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