Ed.: Tyler Stiem is just back in London after forays to Turkey and Syria.

With William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain as my on-again, off-again guide, I spent the past couple of weeks seeking out the points of intersection between Islam and Christianity in Turkey and Syria. While southern Anatolia bore few obvious traces of its rich and complicated religious history, Syria was a revelation. Especially Aleppo, with its still-thriving Armenian, Maronite, and Greek Orthodox communities and its Dead Cities with their splendid Byzantine churches. So, too, the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus. Like the Aya Sofia, another magnificent house of worship from late antiquity, the mosque doubled, for a time, as a site of worship for both Christians and Muslims. Pictured above is a scene from inside.

During my travels I also managed to add a few more calls to prayer to my collection:

Ankara, Turkey (3:30). Broadcast over the p.a. system at the central bus station. The noise and neuroses of travellers hurrying onto buses probably explains its urgency. Very few people obliged.

Antakya, Turkey (3:08). I awoke to this on a black September morning. Dig the reverb. Haunting, lovely, maybe a little over-the-top.

Aleppo, Syria (1:45). The midday call to prayer from one of the mosques in the Old City. Very stern.

Aleppo, Syria (4:40). An Armenian marching band thrown in for good measure. We stayed in the Christian Quarter near the city’s main Armenian Cathedral. The band practiced their instruments by torchlight, jostling against the walls of the smoking alleyway as they passed beneath our window.