Great Mosque of Samarra
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- The minaret's name, al-Malwiya, is usually rendered as the snail-shell tower, after the ramp coiling around it.
- The minaret was originally joined to the mosque by a bridge, and stands apart on the north side of the enclosure.
- The brick outer wall is reinforced by 44 semicircular towers and pierced by 16 doorways.
- The walls were once lined with mosaics of dark blue glass, fragments of which archaeologists have recovered.
- The roof over the prayer aisles rose about 11 metres, carried on octagonal brick piers with marble columns at their corners.
- According to tradition, the courtyard fountain was carved from a single huge stone, the "Pharaoh's Cup", and brought in by elephants.
- Al-Mutawakkil's building list, including this mosque and up to twenty palaces, is said to have cost between 258 and 294 million dirhams.
- The caliph who built the mosque, al-Mutawakkil, was assassinated in 861, only a decade after its completion.
- A second spiral minaret of the same type was built for the Abu Dulaf Mosque, also in Samarra.
- The Malwiya inspired Philip Johnson's spiralling Chapel of Thanksgiving of 1976 in Dallas, Texas.
Why it is worth it
In the 9th century the Abbasid caliphs left Baghdad and built a new capital upstream on the east bank of the Tigris. Samarra was founded by al-Mu'tasim in 836 and remained the seat of the caliphate until 892, and in those few decades it filled with palaces and mosques. Its grandest monument was the Great Mosque raised by Caliph al-Mutawakkil between 848 and 851. When it was finished it was the largest mosque in the world: the enclosure covered about 166,000 square metres and could hold more than 60,000 worshippers under a roof carried on 464 pillars in seventeen aisles.
The roof and pillars are long gone — the mosque was ruined in the 13th century after the Mongol invasion — but the immense outer wall of fired brick still stands, and so does the building everyone comes to see: the Malwiya, the spiral minaret. It rises 52 metres from a base 33 metres wide, and a ramp winds around the outside of the tapering cone, so the tower looks less like a minaret than a great brick screw turning into the sky. Nothing quite like it had been built before. Some writers have linked its shape to the ancient ziggurats of Mesopotamia, an idea modern scholars treat with caution; what is certain is that the design travelled: the Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo shows its influence.
Seen from the top of the ramp, the flat Mesopotamian plain spreads out in every direction, over the ground where the Abbasid capital once stood. The minaret was damaged in 2005, but its silhouette remains intact. Since 2007 the mosque has been part of the Samarra Archaeological City, a UNESCO World Heritage site covering more than 15,000 hectares.
Getting there
The mosque lies about 1.3 km from the centre of Samarra. Samarra is some 125 km north of Baghdad by road. The nearest international airport is Baghdad International Airport (BGW), about 110 km away.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Great Mosque of Samarra or Al-Malwiya Mosque is a former congregational mosque, now in partial ruins, in Samarra, in the Saladin Governorate of Iraq. The mosque was commissioned in 848 CE and completed in 851 by the Abbasid caliph Al-Mutawakkil. At the time of construction it was the world's largest mosque. It is known for its 52-metre-high (171 ft) minaret encircled by a spiral ramp. The former mosque is within the 15,058-hectare (37,210-acre) Samarra Archaeological City UNESCO World Heritage Site, listed in 2007.
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