Al-Ukhaidir Fortress

Alone on a flat gravel plain south of Karbala, its high blank walls rising straight out of the desert, stands one of the best-preserved palaces of the early Islamic world: Al-Ukhaidir. Built around 775 CE — most likely by Isa ibn Musa, a nephew of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, who is said to have raised it as a refuge after being shut out of the line of succession — it has stood remarkably intact for some twelve and a half centuries.

From outside it looks like a pure fortress: a vast rectangle of limestone walls roughly 175 by 169 metres, more than two and a half metres thick and nearly 19 metres high, studded with rounded towers and a gate on each side. But step inside and it becomes a palace. Around its courtyards lie a great vaulted hall, a soaring iwan, reception rooms and living quarters — and the complex even has its own mosque, so that a ruler could live entirely self-contained behind those walls. Its bold brick-and-stone vaulting and pointed arches make it a landmark in the very birth of Abbasid architecture.

Al-Ukhaidir owes its survival to its isolation: too remote to be quarried for stone or built over, it was simply left to the desert. It was the British traveller and archaeologist Gertrude Bell who brought it to wider attention, surveying the ruins and publishing her landmark study in 1914. Today visitors can still climb its ramparts and walk its echoing vaulted halls — one of the most atmospheric historic sites in all of Iraq.