There's a lot of history in Syria that's been damaged by the fighting and deliberate cultural destruction Daesh (ISIS) broadcasted in its videos.
Here's the good news: Hama's iconic waterwheels — built as early as the fifth century to route water into aqueducts — are still intact. Rumors of their destruction circulated in August when a Twitter user posted a photo alleging the norias were burned to the ground by regime soldiers.
Sources said the photo seems to be fake, but some who heard the news still believed the allegations. The American Association for the Advancement of Science confirmed ten norias to have been safe on Aug. 4, 2014, with no reports of damage.
While the photo was posted on August 8, sources from Syria said they saw the norias in Hama unchanged. They provided a photo of a noria taken on June 17.
Built on the banks of the Orontes River, the norias became a symbol of the city itself when Hama witnessed a massacre in 1982. It wasn't the last — at the beginning of the 2011 revolution, the regime threw bodies of protesters in the Orontes, turning the river red.
