In the 4,000-year-old seaside city of Acre, the green tip of a minaret stands sentinel above two large domes of the same color, puncturing the otherwise seamless blue Mediterranean sky. Underneath the structure’s spacious, palm tree-lined courtyard are a series of cisterns fed by water from the nearby Kabri springs. Also known as The Great Mosque and The White Mosque, this place of worship owes both its design and existence to a famous Ottoman ruler of obscure origins.
Sometime between 1720 and 1739, a young boy now known as Ahmed was born in what is today southern Bosnia. After moving to Constantinople, Ahmed worked for a period in Anatolia, eventually landing in Egypt, where he quickly curried favor with Mamluk officials. Mamluks were young Balkan (including Bosnian), Circassian, Coptic, Turkic, and Georgian men who had been sold into slavery and trained as soldiers for their captors. At one point, these slaves revolted and took control from their former owners, although they kept the slavery apparatus running so as to have a continuous supply of future rulers and administrators.
Nearby
Name | Since | Distance | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Nisco Museum | 2020 | 26km | site_ao | ||
Monfort Fortress | 2020 | 19.8km | site_ao | ||
Or Torah Synagogue | 2020 | 0.6km | site_ao | ||
Mount Tabor | 2019 | 40km | site_ao | ||
Mount Arbel | 2018 | 40.7km | site_ao | ||
Beit She’arim Necropolis | 2018 | 25km | site_ao | ||
Soldier’s House (Beit Hachyal) | 1963 | 13.5km | site_brutalism | ||
Faculty of Mechanical Engineering (today Danciger Laboratories), Technion | 17.1km | site_brutalism | |||
Leo Baeck School | 14.7km | site_brutalism | |||
Immigrants Hostel (today The Alfred & Irma Morgenthau Absorption Center) | 33.4km | site_brutalism | |||
Necropolis of Bet She’arim: A Landmark of Jewish Renewal | 2015 | 25.2km | site_whs | ||
Tyre | 1984 | 40.4km | site_whs | ||
Bahá’i Holy Places in Haifa and the Western Galilee | 2008 | 13.9km | site_whs | ||
Biblical Tels – Megiddo, Hazor, Beer Sheba | 2005 | 37.7km | site_whs | ||
Sites of Human Evolution at Mount Carmel: The Nahal Me’arot / Wadi el-Mughara Caves | 2012 | 29.8km | site_whs | ||
Old City of Acre | 2001 | 1.4km | site_whs |
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