Citadel of AleppoAleppo, Syria العربية
The moat and the glacis below the walls
CC BY-SA · Wikimedia Commons

Ayyubid · deepened under al-Zahir Ghazi · cleared 1415

The Moat

الخندق

Twenty-two metres deep and thirty wide, cut into the rock around the whole mound and fed by water channels.

Depth
22 m
Width
30 m
Period
Ayyubid, 12th–13th c.
State
Standing

The moat is the first thing the Citadel does to you. Before any wall, any gate, any tower, there is simply a hole in the ground twenty-two metres deep and thirty metres wide, running the entire way around the mound. An attacking army arriving at Aleppo did not begin by fighting. It began by looking down.

The ditch is Ayyubid in its present form, deepened under al-Malik al-Zahir Ghazi at the turn of the thirteenth century, and it was fed from the city's water channels so that it could be flooded. In 1415, after Timur had passed through and left the fortress wrecked, the Mamluk governor Sayf al-Din Jakam had it cleared out again.

The chroniclers record how he did it, and the detail is worth keeping. Jakam conscripted the city — not the poor alone, but the notables too, the merchants and the office-holders, made to dig side by side with labourers. Aleppo dug its own moat, together, under compulsion. It is a very old story about what a city will do when it is frightened enough.