Bab Kisan

The gate at the southeast corner of Old Damascus, and the only one of the seven ancient gates that now stands as the front of a church. Walk under the arch and you are not in a street but inside the Chapel of Saint Paul. The gate takes its name from Kisan, a slave who became known during a conquest under the Caliph Muawiya. The Romans called it the gate of Saturn: each gate in their wall was dedicated to a planet, with Bab Sharqi given to the Sun and Bab Touma to Venus.

Getting there

Walk south from Bab Sharqi along the eastern wall: 375 metres as the crow flies, about 500 metres and 7 minutes through the lanes. From the Chapel of Saint Ananias it is 650 metres in the same direction. The gate faces outward, onto the end of Ibn Asakir Street — so you see it from outside the walls, from the opposite pavement, not from within the old city.

How long it takes

Half an hour. Ten minutes of that is spent outside reading the façade, the rest is the chapel inside. The gate faces a busy junction and traffic moves through it, so take your time crossing.

What to see

The façade reads in three stages. In the middle, a round-arched doorway, its arch stones cut with rolled mouldings. Directly above the arch, a window opening blocked up with masonry. Higher still, each of the two flanking blocks carries a carved stone roundel holding a Chi-Rho. Those are the first two Greek letters of the name of Christ, and one of the oldest Christian symbols. Inside, the chapel is plain; a sequence of icons along the wall tells the life of Paul in order, painted for the visit of Pope John Paul II in 2001.

The story attached to it

In Acts 9 and the second letter to the Corinthians 11, Paul has to leave Damascus at night. The gates are watched, so he is let down from a window in the wall in a basket. Tradition puts that spot here, and it is why the chapel was founded on this site in 1939, with stones of the gate built into it. The other end of the story is 650 metres north at the Chapel of Saint Ananias, where Paul recovered his sight and was baptised. The escape belongs here.

Do not miss

The blocked window above the arch. Most visitors look at the arch and the roundels and go straight in. That sealed opening is what the basket story points to — the Dutch archivist who photographed the gate in 1950 wrote the same note under his own frame. The stonework you see is not Roman itself: the gate was rebuilt more than once over the centuries, worked on in the Mamluk period and again in the 18th century.