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.