Saidnaya

thumb|View of the city in 2010 Saidnaya (), also transliterated as Saydnaya, Seidnaya or Sednaya, is a city located in the mountains, above sea level, north of the city of Damascus in Syria. It is the home of a Greek Orthodox monastery traditionally held to have been founded by Byzantine emperor Justinian I, and where a renowned icon of the Virgin Mary is revered by Christians to this day. According to the Syria Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), Saidnaya had a population of 5,194 in the 2004 census.

==Etymology== Local tradition holds that Saydnaya means ‘Halting-place of the gazelle’. The place-name has also been thought to mean Our Lady the New, from the Greek nea, ‘new’, and the Arabic sayyida, ‘lady’. However, the word sayd is generally related to hunting, and naya is a typical place-suffix in Syriac; therefore, Saydnaya probably means simply a hunting-place. Indeed, in ancient times, a temple of Saydoun, the Phoenician god of the hunt, stood in this once densely forested region. Under later Christian and Arabic influence, perhaps the name may have been thought to mean the ‘place of the Lady’.