Al-Hadbaa Minaret

For more than 800 years a slender brick tower leaned over Mosul's Old City, tilting so far from upright that people nicknamed it al-Hadba — "the hunchback." Built around 1172 as the minaret of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri, it rose about 45 metres, wrapped in seven bands of intricate geometric brickwork, and by modern times it tilted nearly three metres off vertical — one of the most strikingly crooked towers in the world.

Mosulis loved it fiercely, and told a tender legend to explain the lean: that the minaret had bowed in reverence as the Prophet Muhammad passed overhead on his night journey to heaven, and never quite straightened again. So beloved was its crooked silhouette that it appeared on the Iraqi 10,000-dinar banknote.

In June 2017 ISIS destroyed it along with the mosque — but the hunchback proved hard to keep down. When UNESCO set out to rebuild the tower, a survey found that about 94 percent of Mosul's people wanted it restored exactly as it had been: lean and all. Conservators rebuilt it in brick by traditional methods not used for centuries, reusing roughly 90 percent of the original bricks recovered from the debris, and they made it tilt once more. Today al-Hadba leans over Mosul again, exactly as the city remembered it.