Aleppo

Aleppo is a city in northern Syria and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, and its walled old town holds three of the great works of Islamic urban architecture: the Citadel, the covered al-Madina Souq and the Great Mosque. The Ancient City of Aleppo has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1986 and was placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2013, after heavy damage during the Syrian civil war. For architects, Aleppo is a lesson in dense courtyard urbanism and a live test of how a historic city is repaired.

What is Aleppo as an architectural subject?

Most people meet Aleppo through the news. Architects meet it through its fabric. The Ancient City of Aleppo is described as a place of large mansions, narrow alleys, covered souqs and caravanserais, and before the war many of its districts had remained essentially unchanged since they were built between the 11th and 16th centuries. The city grew as a set of economically independent, cell-like quarters around a walled core, with the Citadel on its hill at the centre.

As a subject, Aleppo therefore covers several scales at once. At the largest it is a study of a trading city on routes that, as Wikipedia's account of the souq puts it, connected Aleppo with China and Mesopotamia to the east, Europe to the west, and Egypt to the south. At the middle scale it is a set of building types: the fortified citadel, the congregational mosque, the covered market street, the khan or caravanserai, and the courtyard house. At the smallest scale it is about stone, vaults, shade and the threshold between a busy lane and a quiet inner court.

The topic also has a second, more recent meaning. Since 2012, Aleppo has become a reference point for post-conflict reconstruction: how to stabilise damaged monuments, how to bring traders back into a burnt market, and how to rebuild homes without erasing the city's character. That is where most work on this page sits. The wider architecture of the region is covered in Arabic architecture, and projects about commemoration in general sit under memorial design; this article stays with Aleppo itself.

A short history of Aleppo's architecture

The Citadel of Aleppo is the oldest layer you can still see. Use of the citadel hill dates back at least to the middle of the third millennium BC, when a temple to the storm god Hadad stood there. Most of what stands today is thought to come from the Ayyubid period: al-Zahir Ghazi, who ruled Aleppo from 1193 to 1215, strengthened the walls, clad the slope in stone, deepened the moat and built the tall bridge that still serves as the entrance, and the entrance block itself was rebuilt in 1213.

The second milestone is the Great Mosque of Aleppo. It was first built under the Umayyad caliphate at the start of the 8th century, but the building that survived into the 21st century dated from the 11th to 14th centuries. Its minaret was begun in 1090 under the Seljuk governor Aq Sunqur al-Hajib and finished in 1094; the architect was Hasan ibn Mufarraj al-Sarmini. The third is the market. Most of the souqs of al-Madina Souq date back to the 14th century, and the khans inside it were added over the following centuries, from Khan al-Qadi (1450) to Khan al-Jumruk (1574), described as the largest khan in ancient Aleppo.

The modern chapter is about planning. In 1954 the French architect André Gutton had wide new roads cut through the old city for traffic, and many old buildings were demolished for apartment blocks. Gutton's plan was abandoned in 1979 for a new plan by the Swiss urban designer Stefano Bianca, which aimed to preserve the traditional architectural style, and local activists led by Adli Qudsi helped secure the World Heritage listing in 1986. The rehabilitation that followed, supported by the German agency GTZ and the Aga Khan Historic Cities Programme, won Harvard's Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design in 2005.

"Aleppo shows us how urban rehabilitation in a historic setting can transmit a vital new meaning when the main focus is restoring urban fabric rather than rebuilding monuments."

Joan Busquets, jury chair of the Veronica Rudge Green Prize, quoted in the Harvard Gazette (2005)

Key principles of Aleppo's urban fabric

A citadel that anchors the city

Everything in old Aleppo reads in relation to the Citadel. It is a palace city on a hill, ringed by a moat and reached by a single bridge, and by the early 13th century it held palaces, baths, a mosque and shrines, an arsenal, cisterns and granaries. Many member proposals for Aleppo starts by deciding how to face it: frame it, step below it, or stay lower than it.

The covered market as a street

Al-Madina Souq is described as the largest covered historic market in the world, about 13 kilometres of long, narrow alleys. Each alley was named after a trade, so the wool souq, the copper souq and the soap souq were also addresses. The vaulted roof gives shade and a steady climate, and the shops stay small, so the street does the work of a building.

Khans: courtyards for trade

Traders and their goods were housed in khans scattered through the souq. A khan is, in the Aga Khan Trust for Culture's own definition, an inn for travellers built on a central courtyard. Their stone façades and heavy wooden doors give the market its rhythm of closed lane and open court. Member work picks up the same idea: Nur al-Turath, Light of Heritage by Darby Stephens, designed for the Revivify competition as an archaeological park in Aleppo, opens with a rendering of a souq courtyard ringed by arcades.

A mosque built in layers

The Great Mosque shows how Aleppo's monuments grew by addition. A Mirdasid fountain was added to the courtyard in the 11th century, Nur al-Din restored and expanded the building after a fire in 1159, and the Mamluks carried out repairs and new work after the Mongol attacks, including a new mihrab in 1285.

The courtyard house and the quarter

Behind the lanes, family life turned inward to the courtyard. The House, The Urban Fabric, by Tatiana P, fabian3412 and Arkiworks, reads the old city as courtyards, alleys, iwans and markets forming one continuous fabric, and proposes rebuilding outward from the house to the neighbourhood and the square. Readers interested in the type itself will find more under courtyard houses.

Aleppo on uni.xyz

The Aleppo topic is unusually focused. Nearly every item here was designed for the same few hectares around the Citadel, many of them for the Memory competition, whose theme one journal records as "Memory Regathering Syria." Reading them together shows a whole range of answers to one site.

#NeoSyria, by Sourav Banerjea, Siddharth Verma and Madhur Agarwal, is the most liked project in this topic. Its statement asks who remembers Aleppo in an "Instagram" and "Snapchat" world, and sets out to help Syrians build a new identity through human-to-human connection, digital technology and social media. The boards are laid out as social media stories, each ending in an urban proposal.

Museum of Memory, by Riccardo Renzi and shortlisted in the Memory competition, gathers archives, a library and museum spaces into one civic centre. Its long, low wall topped with shallow domes lets the hilltop fortress and its minaret keep the skyline.

Aleppo: A Tangible Heritage, by Maysa Sarieddine, Shantal Ayoub and Mariam Dandachi, received an Honorable Mention in the Memory competition. It is the boldest of the group: it removes the Grand Serail, reprograms the Justice Palace and gives the ground at the foot of the Citadel back to residents as gardens, markets and a curving rust-red memorial wall that people walk alongside rather than stand before.

Gate Between Past and Future, a Memory entry by Zsolt Vasáros DLA, Vivien Bettina Tamas, Laura Penzes and Judit Bielik, works on the site of the former al-Madina market district. It turns the square toward the Citadel and scatters stone benches and low walls engraved with quotations, stories and artworks by Syrian artists, so that sitting down becomes a way of reading. In a related shortlisted scheme, Art Center in Aleppo, Zsolt Vasáros DLA and Wael Abaji place a concert hall and music institute as two glazed blocks that pull apart to frame the castle.

Two further schemes go into the ground. Peace Place, by Alina Malih, sits directly in front of the Citadel and lowers a library, museum, refugee centre, restoration workshops and classrooms into sunken courtyards, drawing its authority from depth rather than height. Reconstruction Memory Hive, by Abdo Shahadeh and Ghaith Tish, proposes a cluster of conical structures assembled from broken concrete and salvaged debris beside the Citadel, borrowing from Syria's beehive houses, domed shrines and souk vaults. The UNI journal on New City Space, a perforated courtyard building by Ehsan Nazarzadeh, Faezeh Soleimani, Masoud Nimehfrosh and Mahsa Yousefpour, puts the shared position plainly.

"Reconstruction, then, cannot be a matter of pouring concrete back into craters."

UNI, New City Space: Rebuilding Aleppo Through Architecture That Remembers (uni.xyz journal)

Other members widen the brief beyond buildings: Urban Recovery by Mariam Bazzi and Cindy Houeis maps food supply chains and music learning nodes around the Citadel, and Co-Existence, an Honorable Mention in the Memory competition by Abdallah Kouatly, Firouz Firouz, Maryam Masoudi and Farnoush Poursafavi, builds a palm grove and sunken amphitheatre around the Japanese idea of Ma.

Challenges and future directions

The scale of the task is the first challenge. UNESCO estimated in 2017 that about 30 percent of the Ancient City had been destroyed during the fighting, including many sections of al-Madina Souq, and the Great Mosque's minaret fell in April 2013. The Citadel reopened to the public in early 2018 with repairs underway, and some of its damage is being kept deliberately as part of its history. It was damaged again in the 2023 earthquake. Work on the Great Mosque and its minaret began around 2017, and the mosque has since reopened.

The second is method. The Aga Khan Trust for Culture's rehabilitation of Souk al-Saqatiyya began as a pilot along 150 metres of the market, covering the vaulted roof, the central passage, infrastructure and utilities, and three finished shops as samples. It won an ICCROM-Sharjah Award in 2020 and was extended to Souk Khan al-Harir. The lesson echoes the 2005 prize: repair the shared fabric and services first, and let owners and traders return to it.

"I believe the city center has been saved because of the high esteem in which Aleppines hold their city."

Hashim Sarkis, quoted in the Harvard Gazette (2005)

Future questions for designers are practical: how to reuse rubble responsibly, how to restore without freezing the city, and how new public space can sit beside monuments without crowding them. The architectural restoration topic covers the technical side.

Aleppo for students and designers

Aleppo is a demanding thesis site because every move is read against the Citadel and against loss. Strong angles include a phased plan for one damaged souq alley, a khan converted to workshops for building crafts, a courtyard house rebuilt with salvaged stone, or a public room at the foot of the Citadel that stays lower than it. Ground your proposal in the real history and in published restoration work, and treat residents as the main clients. Survey drawings matter here: a measured section through a souq alley or a khan teaches more about shade, ventilation and the meeting of public and private space than any precedent image. The member work on this page also shows the range of possible tones, from the playful social media boards of #NeoSyria to the restraint of a low archive below the Citadel. Browse open briefs on uni.xyz competitions, and read across cultural heritage for related thinking.

Frequently asked questions

Why is the old city of Aleppo important in architecture?

It combines a citadel, a great mosque, a vast covered souq, khans and courtyard houses in one continuous fabric built mostly between the 11th and 16th centuries. That density made it a World Heritage Site in 1986 and a model for rehabilitation long before the war.

How long is the covered souq of Aleppo?

Al-Madina Souq is about 13 kilometres long and is described as the largest covered historic market in the world. Most of its souqs date back to the 14th century and are named after crafts and trades.

Is the Ancient City of Aleppo still a World Heritage Site?

Yes. It was inscribed in 1986 and placed on the List of World Heritage in Danger in 2013 because of the Syrian civil war.

Who is restoring Aleppo's souq?

The Aga Khan Trust for Culture led the rehabilitation of Souk al-Saqatiyya as a pilot in the central souk and extended the work to Souk Khan al-Harir. Its work received an ICCROM-Sharjah Award for best practice in 2020.

When was the minaret of the Great Mosque of Aleppo built?

Construction began in 1090 under the Seljuk governor Aq Sunqur al-Hajib and finished in 1094. The minaret was destroyed in April 2013, and restoration began around 2017.

References and further reading

• Ancient City of Aleppo, Wikipedia
• Citadel of Aleppo, Wikipedia
• Great Mosque of Aleppo, Wikipedia
• Al-Madina Souq, Wikipedia
• List of World Heritage in Danger, Wikipedia
• New perspectives on ancient city, Harvard Gazette
• Aga Khan Trust for Culture receives ICCROM-Sharjah award for best practice in conservation of Islamic heritage, Aga Khan Development Network