Damascus' glorious ʾUmayyād Mosque is the latest and longest-lasting incarnation of the Roman temenos. According to Creswell, part of the latter sanctuary was transformed into the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in 379 CE, during the reign of Theodosius the Great. The exact location of the Christian edifice is unknown but was likely somewhere in the west part of the central courtyard.
Muslim sources inform us that the church was demolished by Caliph al-Walīd I, who is credited with constructing the ʾUmayyād Mosque within the inner enclosure of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Damascenus. The Caliph kept the external walls of the temenos, marked red in the attached plan, and rebuilt practically everything else from scratch. In the process, several architectural elements of the venerable temple were "recycled" into the new edifice, as could easily be verified by glancing at the Corinthian columns in the courtyard, prayer hall, and colonnades.
What is left today from al-Walīd's work is quite limited, namely the arcades forming the porticoes surrounding the central courtyard, the external gates, the transept, and the Minaret of the Bride. The rest were repeatedly destroyed throughout the ages and had to be reconstructed, seemingly following the original template. The calamities that befell the edifice are too numerous to be listed in a short post, though one can particularly identify as most destructive the 1069 fire towards the end of Fāṭimīd rule in central Syria, Tamerlane's vandalism in 1401, and the tragic 1893 fire. So thorough was the destruction in the last conflagration that quite a few observers thought that the mosque had vanished forever.
Loreline Simonis. Les relevés des mosaïques de la grande mosquée de Damas. Paris, Louvre éditions /Somogy 2012.
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