The Al-Fathiyah Madrasa

Inside the walls, in the Qaymariyya quarter east of the Umayyad Mosque. An Ottoman treasury official named Fethi al-Defterdar built the madrasa in 1743; the building is registered and used today as the Fethiye Mosque. This page is not complete, and it says so: three separate encyclopaedias carry the same single sentence about it.

What a defterdar was

The defterdar kept the finances of an Ottoman province: taxes, registers, treasury. In Damascus the 18th century was precisely the century when men of that kind left buildings behind — the Azm family’s palace and khans, Abdullah Pasha’s madrasa, this madrasa. Founding a madrasa then was a mark of rank as much as an act of charity, and the Fathiyah is a late example of the habit.

What is known, what is not

Known: the year 1743, the founder’s name, that the building was a madrasa complex, that it stands in Qaymariyya, and that it survives and is accessible today as a mosque. Its coordinates agree across two separate data sets, which is why this page carries a real map.

Not known: the plan, the shape of the courtyard, whether it has a foundation inscription, what became of its library. The encyclopaedia entries place it in the same tradition as the Adiliyah and Zahiriyah libraries but do not go further. There is no photograph either: the archives hold frames of the lanes of Qaymariyya and not one documented frame of the building.

Getting there, and how long

Leave the Umayyad Mosque by the east gate, pass under the arch of Bab Jayrun and walk east past the Nawfara café. The building sits inside the quarter, four hundred metres east of the mosque courtyard; the lanes run two or three metres wide under vine cover. 15 minutes. It is not a stop to make on its own but a link on the Qaymariyya walk.