- Minaret
- 21 m, Zangid
- Origin
- Byzantine church
- Rebuilt
- Ayyubid, c. 1200
- State
- Under restoration
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/great-mosque, and it brings you here.
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.