Great Mosque of Samarra

Start with your feet. The ground here is pale, dry and fine, and it crunches softly under each step. Above you, the sky over the Tigris plain is wide and almost white at midday. And in front of you, a tower of baked brick winds upward in a slow spiral. It does not look like any minaret you have seen before. It looks more like a shell, or a staircase that decided to keep going.

This is the Great Mosque of Samarra, on the east bank of the Tigris, north of Baghdad. Its tower has a local name, the Malwiya. The word is usually translated as something twisted or coiled, like the shell of a snail. Once you hear the name, it is hard to see the tower any other way. The ramp wraps around the core again and again, narrowing as it rises, until it reaches a small chamber at the top.

To understand why a monument this large stands in this quiet place, you need one piece of history. In the ninth century, Samarra was the capital of the Abbasid caliphate. The Abbasids were the dynasty that ruled much of the Islamic world from Iraq, and Baghdad was their famous city. But in the 830s, the caliph al-Mu'tasim moved his court and his army here. For roughly half a century, this stretch of riverbank was the centre of an empire.

The mosque itself came a little later. It was commissioned by the caliph al-Mutawakkil in the middle of the ninth century, and it was built over just a few years. When it was finished, it was the largest mosque in the world. That claim surprises many visitors, because today the site feels so empty. But walk the length of the walls, and the scale starts to make sense. This was a building for a capital city and a very large congregation.

Look now at those walls. They form a huge rectangle of baked brick, and they are still standing to an impressive height. Along their outer face, you will see rounded towers set at regular intervals, like the walls of a fortress. They were not built for defence. They helped to brace the long brick walls, and they gave the enclosure a strong, steady rhythm. In the low morning or evening sun, each tower throws its own curved shadow across the ground.

Step inside the enclosure, and here is the second surprise. The vast interior is almost completely open to the sky. But it was not always like this. Originally, a forest of columns filled much of this space and carried a flat roof. Worshippers stood in long shaded halls, with an open courtyard at the centre. The columns and roof are gone now. What remains is a quiet field of earth and scattered brick, and the outline of a space that once held thousands of people at prayer.

On the side of the enclosure that faces Mecca, look for the place where the mihrab once stood. A mihrab is a niche in the wall that shows worshippers the direction of prayer. Here, only traces survive, so you have to read the wall closely. Even so, it helps to stand there and turn around. From this point, imagine the rows of worshippers stretching back toward the far wall, all facing you.

Now return to the Malwiya. Notice that it does not rise from inside the prayer hall, as many minarets do. It stands just outside the enclosure, on the north side, linked to the mosque but separate from it. That placement gives it a strong presence on the flat plain. From a distance, the tower appears long before the walls do. For travellers on the roads and the river, it worked as a landmark for the city as well as a place for the call to prayer.

The ramp itself is the tower's great idea. There are no internal stairs. Instead, a single path climbs around the outside, turning steadily as it goes up. The tower is more than fifty metres high, and the ramp has no railing. Look at how the path gets narrower near the top. Any climber feels more exposed with each turn. Locals tell a story that a caliph once rode up the ramp on a donkey. It is a popular tale, but it is legend, not documented history.

Where did this unusual form come from? Scholars have debated that question for a long time. Some point to the stepped temple towers of ancient Mesopotamia, the ziggurats, which also had ramps and stairs that climbed around them. Others see the Malwiya mainly as an Abbasid invention. What is clear is that the idea travelled. A similar spiral minaret stands at the mosque of Abu Dulaf, a little to the north. And the famous mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo has a spiral minaret that is often linked to Samarra.

The Abbasid court did not stay. Late in the ninth century, the caliphs moved back to Baghdad, and the great city of Samarra slowly shrank. Its palaces, streets and barracks became low mounds of earth. In the early twentieth century, the German archaeologist Ernst Herzfeld carried out excavations here and recorded much of what remained. In 2007, the ancient city of Samarra was added to the UNESCO World Heritage list, and it was also placed on the list of sites in danger.

That danger is real, and you can see a small sign of it. In 2005, during the violence that followed the war in Iraq, an explosion damaged the top of the minaret. Look up at the small chamber at the summit, and you may notice that the brickwork there looks different from the brick below. The modern city of Samarra also carries other scars from those years, including the attack on the al-Askari shrine, with its golden dome, which has since been rebuilt.

Before you leave, take one slow walk along the outside of the walls. Run your eye along the brick. In many places, you can see the regular courses laid by the original builders, and also later patches and repairs. Notice the colours, too. The brick changes from soft gold to pale grey to warm brown as the light moves across it. Every one of those bricks was shaped, fired and carried here by hand, more than eleven centuries ago.

Now stand back far enough to see the tower and the walls together. Listen for a moment. You may hear wind across the plain, a car on a distant road, perhaps birds circling the summit. A city once filled this whole horizon. Today, the spiral is what remains to mark it. As you walk away, turn around once more. From a distance, the Malwiya keeps its shape, rising slowly against the sky.