Mar Assia al-Hakim Church, Aleppo

It sits on one of the narrow lanes of Jdeideh, a few steps from the Forty Martyrs. The church belongs to the Syriac Catholic archeparchy of Aleppo and is among the oldest still standing in the city: the present building went up in 1500 and has been in use since.

Getting there

Walk east from the church courtyard of Jdeideh. The church lines a narrow lane and has no front on any square. The Forty Martyrs is eighty metres away, the Greek Orthodox Church of the Virgin forty.

How long it takes

Half an hour. Ten minutes for the lane, twenty for the inside.

What to see

The story of the church is the story of the quarter. When Tamerlane took Aleppo in 1400 and destroyed it, the Christians moved outside the walls and founded their own neighbourhood in 1420 on the north-western edge of the city; that is how Jdeideh began. Most of them returned by the end of the 15th century, and the Syriac Catholics rebuilt the church in 1500 under the name Cathedral of Our Lady of the Syrians. Between the 17th and 19th centuries it served as the seat of the Syriac Catholic patriarchate, and Pietro Della Valle mentions it after his visit to Aleppo in 1625. The hall is 32 metres long and 16 metres wide.

Don’t miss

The upper row of windows, seen from the lane. The long wall of the church runs the whole length of the street, and the arched windows sit only in the upper course; below them the stone is broken by shop doors and small arched openings. You can pace out the 32 metres in the lane, because there is no angle from which the building can be seen whole.

How it stands now

In 1970 the Syriac Catholic prelacy moved to a new cathedral in the central part of the city, and the old church was renamed Mar Assia al-Hakim, Saint Assia the Wise, that same year. It has been damaged twice: in the Aleppo massacre of October 1850, and on 16 September 2012, when shelling destroyed the belfry dating to 1881. Services are still held here.