Malwiya Minaret, Samarra

The 52 m spiral minaret of the 9th-century Great Mosque of Samarra, climbed by a ramp that winds around its outside.

The mosque is now partly in ruins, but the minaret is still its best-known part. In Arabic its name means "Mosque of the Spiral One." It lies inside the huge Samarra Archaeological City, a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2007. The whole World Heritage area covers 15,058 hectares. Al-Mutawakkil was a caliph who loved building and ordered up to twenty palaces as well.

The biggest mosque of its day

For a time the Great Mosque of Samarra was the largest mosque in the world, covering 165,886 square metres with room for more than 60,000 worshippers. It was built from baked brick, with octagonal piers that had marble columns at their corners. Its walls were covered with panels of dark blue glass mosaic, and it had 17 aisles. The marble columns were brought in from elsewhere, a sign of how far the builders reached for materials.

A pattern others copied

Caliph al-Mutawakkil brought artists and architects from all across the Abbasid empire to help. The carved stucco decoration, with flower and geometric patterns, is an early example of Islamic art and influenced later buildings. The Mosque of Ibn Tulun in Cairo, Egypt, was modelled on the Samarra mosque in many ways and also stands in a large open space. It was part of a growth of the city eastward, into the old hunting park.

On the globe

The model shows the cone-shaped spiral minaret with its ramp winding up the outside.