Damascus' glorious Omayyad 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, 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 Walid I, who is credited with constructing the Omayyad Mosque within the space anciently occupied by the internal Temple (temenos) of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Damascenus. The Caliph kept the external walls of the temenos (red color in the attached plan) and rebuilt everything else practically from the scratch. In the process, several architectural elements of the venerable temple were "recycled" into the new edifice, as could easily be verified by a quick look at the Corinthian columns in the courtyard, prayer hall, and colonnades.
What is left today from al-Walid'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. Everything else fell victim, time and again, to natural as well as man-made catastrophes and had to be raised from the ashes repeatedly. Those calamities 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 Fatimid rule in central Syria), Tamerlane's vandalism in 1401, and the tragic 1893 fire after which quite few observers thought that the edifice was gone for good.
http://bornindamascus.blogspot.com/2018/06/blog-post_18.html
Muslim sources inform us that the church was demolished by Caliph Walid I, who is credited with constructing the Omayyad Mosque within the space anciently occupied by the internal Temple (temenos) of Jupiter Optimus Maximus Damascenus. The Caliph kept the external walls of the temenos (red color in the attached plan) and rebuilt everything else practically from the scratch. In the process, several architectural elements of the venerable temple were "recycled" into the new edifice, as could easily be verified by a quick look at the Corinthian columns in the courtyard, prayer hall, and colonnades.
What is left today from al-Walid'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. Everything else fell victim, time and again, to natural as well as man-made catastrophes and had to be raised from the ashes repeatedly. Those calamities 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 Fatimid rule in central Syria), Tamerlane's vandalism in 1401, and the tragic 1893 fire after which quite few observers thought that the edifice was gone for good.
http://bornindamascus.blogspot.com/2018/06/blog-post_18.html
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