Monuments of Syria أوابد سورية
A Window on Syria's Past by Ross Burns
Little remains within the enclosure of this Ismaeli castle taken from the Crusaders by Rashid al-Din Sinan (‘the Old Man of the Mountain’ of Crusader legends) after 1160. Externally, the circuit walls survive in part on the northeast and northwest. For description, Monuments of Syria (third edition, I B Tauris, London 2009), page 231. منشآت […]
The Ismaeli castle at Qalaat al-Khawabi lies approximately 20 kms northeast of Tartus in the Syrian coastal mountains. One of the Ismaeli strongholds of the Crusader period, the castle was re-fortified by Rashid al-Din Sinan, the Ismaeli leader, after 1160. The castle surrendered to the Mamluks under Baybars in 1273. The castle hosted a village […]
These two shrines lie on the hill of Jebel Jaushan to the south of the city. This was the vantage point of European travellers’ depictions of Aleppo from the seventeenth century (see itinerary 1). Both shrines have Shia associations reflecting the dominant influence of Shia traditions in Aleppo until the mid twelfth century before Nur […]
Jdeide (‘new’) Quarter lies just outside the northern walls of the old city of Aleppo. Its name ‘new’ indicates that it was established in the seventeenth century as an extension of the city particularly for those employed by the foreign consulates and ‘factories’ as local employees. Today it still houses an important collection of schools […]
This short itinerary largely concentrates on the magnificent collection housed in the Aleppo branch of the National Museum whose holdings cover all eras of the city’s history as well as of the northern Syria and Euphrates regions. A short diversion at the end takes in the monuments behind the Museum reaching into the Bab al-Faraj […]
The zone south of the main entrance to the Aleppo Citadel was developed as a ceremonial area aligned with the great gateway ascending to the fortifications. Here was buried the great leader of Aleppo’s resistance to the Crusades, al-Zaher Ghazi (ruled Aleppo and a wide stretch of territory east into Mesopotamia from 1186-1216. The Ottomans […]
South of the main suqs of the central walled city of Aleppo. This itinerary includes one of the projects of the great Ottoman architect, Sinan (the Mosque al-Adeliye), a rare surviving examples of an Ayyubid khan or caravanserai, a remarkably intact example of a Mamluk asylum for the insane, a Mamluk mosque built with remains […]
