Citadel of Salah Ed-Din — castle
LBM1948 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Citadel of Salah Ed-Din

  • 1 min read
  • 35.596° N 36.057° E
  • UNESCO World Heritage

Interesting facts

  • Saladin's son az-Zahir Ghazi broke into the castle at its north end, where the ditch meant to cut off the adjoining town had never been finished.
  • For two days before the assault of 29 July 1188, Saladin's siege engines hurled stones weighing between about 50 and 300 kilograms at the walls.
  • The Crusader garrison fell back to the keep and, before the day of the assault was over, agreed to surrender in exchange for ransom.
  • The traditional Arabic name, Sahyun, is the local form of Zion; the Byzantines knew the fortress as Sigon and the Franks as Saône.
  • Its first recorded holder, in the mid-10th century, was a vassal of Sayf al-Dawla, the Hamdanid emir who ruled from Aleppo.
  • Unlike most great Crusader castles, Saône was never handed to the Hospitallers or the Templars and stayed with one family of secular lords until 1188.
  • In the 1280s the rebel Mamluk emir Sunqur al-Ashqar turned the castle into the seat of a small semi-independent emirate, surrendering only in 1287 to Sultan Qalawun's army.
  • The stone needle left standing in the ditch rises about 28 metres and once carried the drawbridge; some scholars credit the cutting of the ditch to the Byzantines.
  • The castle stands on a ridge roughly 700 metres long and guarded the road between the port of Latakia and the city of Antioch.
  • T. E. Lawrence, who studied Crusader castles as a young man, ranked it as the most spectacular feat of castle building he had ever encountered.

Why it is worth it

The Citadel of Salah Ed-Din, known to the Crusaders as Saône and in Arabic also as Sahyun, occupies a narrow, wooded ridge between two deep ravines in the coastal mountains of north-western Syria. Its most astonishing feature is a man-made chasm: to separate the castle from the rest of the ridge, its builders cut a ditch through solid rock about 156 metres long, 14 to 20 metres wide and 28 metres deep, leaving a single slender needle of stone standing in the middle to support a bridge.

A fortress already existed here when the Byzantine emperor John I Tzimiskes took the site in 975. After the First Crusade it passed in about 1108 to the Frankish Principality of Antioch, and most of what survives from that period is attributed to the lords of Saône, above all Robert the Leper. The Crusader works include the massive keep, whose walls are about 5 metres thick, facing the rock-cut ditch. In 1188, during his campaign against the Crusader states that followed the Battle of Hattin, Saladin besieged the castle and took it after only three days. Under the Ayyubids and Mamluks the castle remained in use, and a palace with baths, courtyards and iwans was added inside the walls, along with a mosque dating from the reign of the Mamluk sultan Qalawun. The whole fortified area covers almost 9 hectares.

The site combines Byzantine, Frankish and Islamic military architecture in one place, and in 2006 it was inscribed by UNESCO together with Krak des Chevaliers as the World Heritage Site Crac des Chevaliers and Qal'at Salah El-Din, recognised as outstanding examples of fortification from the period of the Crusades.

Getting there

The castle lies about 7 km east of the town of Al-Haffah and about 30 km east of the city of Latakia, in Latakia Governorate. The nearest airport is Latakia International Airport (LTK), about 24 km away in a straight line.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Places in Syria 9The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites in Syria 5The Greatest Archaeological Wonders in Syria 6The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites in Syria 6The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Castles 24The Most Beautiful UNESCO-Listed Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 92The Most Beautiful Castles 94The Most Remarkable UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Sites 114The Greatest UNESCO-Listed Archaeological Wonders 149The Most Remarkable Archaeological Sites 193The Most Beautiful Castles, Palaces and Fortresses 302The Greatest Archaeological Wonders 306The Most Beautiful UNESCO World Heritage Sites 557

From the encyclopaedia

Castle of Saladin, also known as the Sahyun Castle, is a medieval castle in northwestern Syria. It is located 7 km east of Al-Haffah town and 30 km east of the city of Latakia, in high mountainous terrain on a ridge between two deep ravines and surrounded by forest, the site has been fortified since at least the mid 10th century. In 975 the Byzantine Emperor John I Tzimiskes captured the site and it remained under Byzantine control until around 1108. Early in the 12th century the Franks assumed control of the site and it was part of the newly formed Crusader state of the Principality of Antioch. The Crusaders undertook an extensive building programme, giving the castle much of its current appearance. In 1188 it fell to the forces of Saladin after a three-day siege. The castle was again besieged in 1287, this time both defender and belligerent were Mamluks. In 2006, the castles of Qal'at Salah El-Din and Krak des Chevaliers were recognised as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO. The site is owned by the Syrian government.

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