Greek and Roman Philadelphia

It’s been a long while since we had a great desire to visit Jordan. Unfortunately, the flight fares were always so high that we kept selecting any other destination instead. At the time we went there, the city and the country was not that open to the air traffic and the mass tourism as it is now of course. So thankfully to our benefit, Easyjet announced their new route to the capital, Amman. And what’s best, with any new route, they release some tickets at an introductory offer, and we managed three! Now that was the real deal.

Amman is a rapidly growing city, which basically kicked off some 80 years ago. It’s relatively a very new city, and the architecture you will find is rather ugly and tasteless. But in any case, it’s still worth the visit, not only for the enormous maze of little streets; very charming indeed, but also for the many nice mosques, and of course, the Roman great remains, specially at Citadel Hill, from where you will see the whole of Amman and beyond built on hill after hill.

Citadel Hill, known in Arabic as Jabal al-Qal’a, is what can be considered, the centre of the city. At the top you will find the remains of the Temple of Hercules, and plenty more. Also an Ottoman style mosque, and the most stunning view you can get of the city. Let’s not forget that although the city is very new, it sits atop many layers of different civilizations making it one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world at over 7500 years.

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