The Great Mosque of the Citadel

This is not the Great Umayyad Mosque in the Old City below the mound. That one is Aleppo's congregational mosque and has its own site: umayyadmosque.aleppo-citadel.sy

This building has been a place of prayer under two religions without ever ceasing to be one. It began as a Byzantine church, standing here before the Muslim conquest of 636, and was converted and then rebuilt — restored under Nur al-Din Zangi in the twelfth century and rebuilt in Ayyubid form under al-Zahir Ghazi.

Its square minaret, twenty-one metres tall and Zangid in date, is the thing you see first from anywhere in the Old City. For eight hundred years it has been the mark by which Aleppo locates its own centre: not the palace, not the gate, but the tower on the hill.

The minaret was damaged during the fighting and again in the 2023 earthquake, and restoration is under way.