The Baghdad Gate

The most photographed structure in Raqqa is a gate. It stands alone at the south-eastern end of the Abbasid wall, built in kiln-fired brick. The front is about eight metres wide and five metres high; a broken arch sits over the central opening, with a decorative niche on either side. The upper half does the real work: a wide frieze of niches in two tiers, the lower ones under semicircular arches and the upper ones under trefoil arches. No other gate in Syria plays with brick across a surface like this.

Getting there

At the south-eastern corner of the wall line, east of the city centre. The Uways al-Qarani Mosque stood right beside it — a modern mosque built over the shrine of the companion of Muhammad regarded as Raqqa’s patron saint, and it was blown up in 2014. The ground around the gate is flat and open, and you can drive up to it.

How long it takes

Twenty minutes. The structure is a single piece; you do not go inside, you walk around it. Seeing the front needs morning light, because by the afternoon the gate is in its own shadow.

What to see

Inside, the opening leads through a recess about a metre deep into a passage; the recess once carried a dome. The brickwork is restored in places: the Abbasid walls and this gate were taken into conservation in the 1980s, and new brick went in then. The wall line runs north from either side of the gate, with its towers in a row.

What not to miss

The name is probably wrong. The German archaeologist Herzfeld assigned the gate to Harun al-Rashid’s time. The British scholar Creswell gave it to al-Mansur’s building of 772. Then John Warren, a British architectural historian, read the development of the four-centred arch and placed the gate after the 11th century. The dating accepted today is closer to Warren’s, which makes the gate the work not of the caliph who founded Baghdad but of three centuries later. The name “Baghdad Gate” was most likely given by the new residents who settled around the Ottoman post in the 19th century. When the traveller Edward Shaw saw the city in 1873, he found nothing inside the old walls but black tents.