- Completed
- 1213
- Collapse
- AH 600 / 1203–04
- Builder
- Thabit b. Shaqwayq
- Turns
- Five or six
A station inside the Citadel
A screen stands at this monument playing a short film about it. The address printed on it is aleppo-citadel.sy/bashoura, and it brings you here.
You are standing inside the single most intelligent building on this mound. From the outside it reads as a gatehouse. Inside, it is a machine for killing people slowly.
The passage does not run straight. It turns — five times, or six, depending on which account you follow — at hard right angles, and at every turn the attacker loses momentum, loses formation, and loses the use of a battering ram, which cannot be swung round a corner. Above each turn the vault opens into machicolations: shafts through which the defenders poured boiling liquid and burning oil onto whoever was below. There are concealed passages beneath the floor for the garrison to move unseen, and doors set so that no two can be rushed at once.
The building has a death in it. It was raised under al-Malik al-Zahir Ghazi, and in AH 600 — 1203 or 1204 — it collapsed during construction and killed the master builder, Thabit b. Shaqwayq, the man who had designed it. The work went on. The entrance was completed in 1213 and has never been taken by direct assault in the eight centuries since.
The Mamluks renovated it in 1415 and then did something no earlier ruler had dared: they built a throne room on the roof.