Mashhad al-Muhassin, Aleppo

A small shrine on the slope of Jabal Jawshan, a few hundred metres south of Mashhad al-Husayn. It is easy to walk past. It stands in the shadow of its larger neighbour, and it is the oldest Shia shrine known in Aleppo.

Whose memory it keeps

It was founded in 351 of the Hijri calendar, that is 962, by order of the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla. The child it commemorates is Muhassin, the stillborn son of Husayn, called al-Siqt in the sources.

Getting there

Take the road climbing west out of Kallasa and walk south along the slope. It is a few hundred metres from Mashhad al-Husayn, and joining the two shrines in one walk makes the most sense.

How long it takes

Twenty-five minutes. The building is small. Most of the time goes on the north side of the court and along the edge of the terrace.

What to see

Nothing survives from the building Sayf al-Dawla put up. The complex went through many phases of enlargement over the centuries and was rebuilt in the 13th century by Baraqraq ibn Radi, who also appointed a supervisor, a muezzin and an imam to it. The shrine was not simply repaired; it was set up again as a working institution.

It goes by three names

Mashhad al-Muhassin, Mashhad al-Siqt and Mashhad al-Dikka. The third comes from where it sits: a dikka is a stone terrace, and the building rests on one. In Aleppo that is the name that gets you directions.

Don’t miss

The inscription on the north side of the court. It is written in Ayyubid naskhi script, and Ernst Herzfeld entered it in his records as number 97. It is one of the oldest readable pieces of the building, and most visitors go straight inside.

How it stands now

The western slope of Aleppo was a front line in 2012-2016. We could not confirm the present state of the shrine from an independent source, so ask on the ground before you go. The page carries no coordinates: only one independent source places the building, and a wrong pin is worse than none.