Maqam al-Khidr

Almost everything on this mound is a ruin that people look at. This is not. It is a shrine that people still come to, which makes it the most alive thing up here.

Al-Khidr — the green one — is one of the strangest and most durable figures in the religious life of this region. He appears in the Qur'anic account of Moses as the servant of God who knows what Moses does not. He is identified by many with Saint George, and by others with Elijah. He turns up at springs, at thresholds, at the edges of things, and he is claimed by Muslims and Christians alike, which in a city like Aleppo is not a curiosity but a habit of long standing.

That a shrine to him sits inside the fortress says something the walls do not. This mound was a sanctuary for a millennium and a half before it was ever a citadel, and the habit never entirely stopped.