The Umayyad Mosque

The Great Mosque of Damascus, the Umayyad Mosque, is one of the oldest and grandest mosques in the world, standing on ground that has been sacred, without a break, under several religions.

Layer on layer

The site was a temple of the Aramean storm god Hadad, then a great Roman temple of Jupiter, then, in the Christian centuries, a cathedral of John the Baptist. After the Muslim conquest the space was shared for a time and then, under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid I in the early eighth century, rebuilt as a monumental congregational mosque, one of the first great works of Islamic architecture. Its plan, a broad prayer hall opening onto a colonnaded courtyard, became a model, and its walls once carried celebrated mosaics of an idealised paradise landscape, among the finest of the early Islamic world.

The relics and the shared shrine

Within the prayer hall a shrine is held, by Muslims and Christians alike, to contain the head of John the Baptist, revered in Islam as the prophet Yahya; it was here that a pope first entered a mosque, in 2001. A second shrine commemorates Husayn, the grandson of Muhammad killed at Karbala, whose head is said to have been brought to Damascus, which makes the mosque a place of Shia mourning and pilgrimage in the former capital of the dynasty responsible for his death, a striking convergence of Sunni and Shia sacred memory in one building.

A working mosque

Damaged and restored many times, including after a serious fire in the late nineteenth century, the Umayyad Mosque remains the principal mosque of Damascus and a working place of worship as well as one of the most visited monuments in the Islamic world; the tomb of the great Muslim general Saladin stands in a garden just outside its northern wall.

For most of the eighteenth, nineteenth and part of the twentieth century, visitors to the Umayyad Mosque's western portico saw plain plastered walls, not mosaics. At some point during the long Ottoman period of control over Damascus, from 1517 to 1922, the original Umayyad mosaic decoration was covered over, for reasons no surviving record fully explains; plaster was simply cheaper to maintain than delicate glass tesserae, and later generations may not have known, or cared, what lay underneath.

The covering held until 1893, when a serious fire swept through the mosque. The heat cracked sections of the plaster, and workers repairing the damage noticed glass tesserae glinting through the breaks, the first clue in a century or more that the mosaics had survived at all rather than having been destroyed or removed. It took more than three decades for a systematic response: from 1928, Victor Eustache de Lorey, director of the French Institute in Damascus during the French Mandate period, led a careful restoration campaign specifically aimed at removing the covering plaster and stabilising whatever mosaic remained beneath it.

The result exceeded expectations. Rather than fragments, de Lorey's team uncovered a largely intact 34.5 metre panel, unveiled to the public in 1929 in the same western portico it had always occupied. Nearly four centuries of concealment had, if anything, protected the mosaic from further wear, and the Barada Panel returned to view essentially as Umayyad craftsmen had left it in the early eighth century, one of the most complete surviving examples of early Islamic monumental mosaic art anywhere.

The Umayyad Mosque holds a relic venerated by two religions at once, and a minaret that Islamic eschatology assigns a role in the end of the world.

A shared relic

A shrine inside the mosque is venerated by both Muslims and Christians as containing the head of John the Baptist, known in Islamic tradition as Yahya, a rare instance of a single relic drawing devotion from both communities within the same active place of worship, consistent with the site's layered history as pagan temple, then church, then mosque.

The minaret of Jesus

Islamic eschatological tradition holds that Isa, Jesus, will descend at the end of days at a minaret on the mosque's southeastern corner, a belief that gives that specific structure ongoing devotional significance beyond its architectural function, distinct from the building's role in daily worship.

Damaged by fire and by war

An 1893 fire severely damaged large sections of the mosque, requiring extensive restoration of its mosaics and structure. During the Syrian civil war, fighting in Damascus's old city caused further damage to the complex in the 2010s, adding recent conflict-era harm to a building that had already survived centuries of earlier destruction and rebuilding.