Samarra
"You climb the Malwiya on the outside, in the open air, and feel like you are walking up something that was built as a dare to physics."
The Malwiya minaret appears on the horizon forty minutes north of Baghdad, rising from the Tigris plain like something a child drew when asked to imagine a minaret and then made real at an impossible scale. It is a helix — a spiral ramp winding around a conical core, fifty-two meters high, built from baked brick in 851 CE during the Abbasid caliphate’s brief reign as the center of the medieval world. There is nothing else quite like it in Islamic architecture. The fact that it is still standing, and that you can walk up it, is the kind of thing that makes the phrase “built to last” feel like an understatement.
Samarra was the Abbasid capital for sixty years in the ninth century, when the caliphs moved their court here from Baghdad partly for political reasons and partly because they wanted more room. What they built in those sixty years was extraordinary: a city that may have stretched thirty-five kilometers along the Tigris, with palaces and mosques and markets that represented the full sophistication of a civilization at its height. Then the capital moved back to Baghdad and Samarra began its long contraction into a provincial city, leaving the ruins of all that ambition spread across the landscape in a pattern that archaeologists are still trying to understand.
The Great Mosque of Samarra, to which the Malwiya belonged, was once the largest mosque in the world. The enclosure walls survive — massive fired-brick ramparts that give you the scale of what was here — but the interior is open sky and history. Walking through it, you are walking through a prayer space that held tens of thousands of worshippers in the ninth century and now holds wind and light and the occasional group of Iraqi visitors who look up at the Malwiya from inside the enclosure and seem to be computing the same improbability I am.
The climb up the Malwiya is open-air, on the exterior ramp, with no railing. In the first coil the exposure is manageable; by the third coil you are far enough up that the Tigris valley opens below you and the desert extends in every direction with that absolute Iraqi flatness that produces a particular feeling of vertigo that is not unpleasant but is very focused. At the top, the wind is stronger than expected and the view encompasses an enormous arc of the world — the river, the ruins of the Abbasid city lost in the surrounding plain, and on clear days the distant smudge that might be Baghdad. Ninth-century people climbed this to call the prayer. I climbed it for the view and came down having understood something about the ambition of whoever designed it.
Samarra also holds the Al-Askari Shrine — one of the most important Shia holy sites in Iraq, whose golden dome was destroyed by a bomb in 2006 in an act that nearly triggered a full sectarian civil war, and rebuilt in 2009. The reconstructed dome is luminous and new-looking compared to the ancient setting around it, and that temporal dissonance is part of the experience of Samarra — a city where the Abbasid ninth century, the Shia seventh century, and the violent early twenty-first century are all present simultaneously in the fabric of the place.
When to go: November through March. Samarra sits in the same exposed Mesopotamian plain as Baghdad and bakes equally in summer. Winter days are mild and perfect for climbing the Malwiya; the low sun produces long shadows across the ruins that make the scale of the Abbasid city easier to read from the landscape.