Fulus Mosque, Damascus

A small mosque in the Midan quarter of Damascus, dated to the 11th century and to Fatimid rule. Sources call it either the Fulus Mosque or the Abu Fulus Mosque. Its reputation rests on the mihrab, the niche marking the direction of prayer: the floral stucco worked into it is Fatimid, and it is the one thing the building has carried through.

Where it is

Midan is the quarter that runs south of the old walled city. It was laid out under the Umayyad caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik to extend Damascus southwards, and it now stretches 2500 metres. The name comes from that flat ground, where horses were once raced over gravel left behind by floods of the Barada river. The mosque sits inside that fabric.

How long it takes

15 minutes. This is a neighbourhood mosque: no courtyard tour, no display, no ticket. If the mihrab is why you came, you are already standing at it.

What to see

The mihrab and its stucco. The building has a single minaret and is still in use for prayer, so what you meet is a working local mosque rather than a monument. The rest is plain.

What we could not verify

Some fields on this page are deliberately empty. Neither the street address nor the coordinates of the mosque appear in any source we could reach, so there is no map here and no opening hours are given. The mosque is covered briefly in the literature: Ross Burns’s guide to the monuments of Syria and Ibn al-Mibrad’s register of the mosques of Damascus are the main records. Nothing was written here that we could not confirm.