Great Mosque of Samarra

The Great Mosque of Samarra was once among the largest mosques in the world, built in the ninth century when the city served as the Abbasid capital. Little remains of the vast prayer hall, but its enclosing brick wall with rounded towers still stands, framing a rectangle of enormous scale. Beside it rises the celebrated spiral minaret, a conical brick tower wound by an external ramp climbing to a small platform. Visitors can walk the great enclosure and ascend a structure central to early Islamic architecture.