Introduction
[Picture source: © 1975 Jean-Claude David] [Picture source: © 1975 Jean-Claude David] The Judayda (“the little new”) Quarter owes its origins to the settlement immediately outside the city’s north-western walls.
The first use of “Judayda” for this extra-mural area was recorded in the first half of the 15th century in Ibn ash-Shihna’s description of the city, where it was listed as “the Christian quarter” and given the label “new”.[1] The first churches in this zone appear to have originated in the Mamluk era as chapels in the tradition of extra-mural – probably Byzantine – monastic establishments and as a burial area for the city’s Christian community. We have no precise information on where the Christian community congregated within the city walls in the centuries since the Islamic conquest but it seems clear that Judayda’s origins related essentially to its monastic and burial role rather than as an exercise in segregation.[2] The Christian community until then had probably dwelt in various parts of the old city.[3]
The dynamics of the Christian presence in Aleppo changed after the Ottoman conquest in 1516, after the establishment of European trading stations in the city. This offered new opportunities, not only for employment of local Christians as translators and support staff for European traders, but for engaging in the expanding trade between Europe and the East in general. Accompanying these growing employment opportunities was a new influx of Christians from other parts of the Empire, like Armenians from Asia Minor, Maronites from Mount Lebanon, and Jacobites from the Tur ʿAbdin. The former would later become involved in the silk trade with their counterparts in the Julfa Quarter of Isfahan where their presence had been encouraged under the Safavid ruler Abbas I.[4]
A Muslim institutional presence in the area seems to be almost equally ancient, however, as the Sharaf Mosque in today’s Hatab Square goes back probably to the Mamluk 14th century. A substantial rebuilding programme under the second-last Mamluk sultan, Qansuh al-Ghawri, just before the Ottoman victory in 1516, stands within the context of a larger urban upgrade, including a new water system and the reconstruction of a number of mosques (cf. Sharaf Mosque).[5] Later in the 16th century, the choice of Judayda for the establishment of a hammam by the Ottoman governor, Bahram Pasha (1583), and the extensive endowment of Ibshir Pasha in the mid-17th century showed that the north western suburb was developing into the second economic centre of Aleppo next to the central market area (cf. The Waqf of Ibshir Mustafa Pasha).
The first surviving description of the quarter’s development is the visit by the Italian traveller, Pietro della Valle, in the early 17th century. Shortly after the influx of Armenians trading with Safavid Persia, Pietro della Valle visited Aleppo twice as part of a long itinerary taking him as far east as the Persian capital. In 1625, on his return journey to Europe, he stopped again in Aleppo and described a visit to the city’s extra-mural quarter. He found a group of four Christian churches sharing a common courtyard with a single entrance gate. A fifth church lay immediately outside to the east with its own garden enclosure. The locations of the churches can be identified in successor buildings occupying the same grounds today (Fig. 1). The Armenians were the largest Christian community settled in the Judayda Quarter at the time of della Valle’s visit and two 15th-century Armenian foundations were mentioned. Della Valle also described three other churches—Greek Orthodox (Rum) and Maronite foundations as well as the fifth church just mentioned outside the enclosure, that of the Jacobites (Suriyan).[6]
This cluster of churches appears to have become the kernel for the quarter’s development with the intersection known as as-Saliba (the Cross) becoming particularly associated with the Christian presence as more memes of the communities gathered around their places of worship. As part of a general tendency for Christians associated with the Armenian, Greek Orthodox and Jacobite denominations to cross over to churches associated with Rome, the “Uniate” versions of the Eastern churches began to claim more than half of the Christian community by the 18th century. By the 19th century, increasing numbers brought the building of grand new churches of flamboyant style and dimensions by communities affiliated to Rome—Maronite, Greek Catholic and Armenian Catholic—particularly after 1840 with the lifting of earlier restrictions on the building of new churches.
Even the disturbances of 1850, starting as protests against general conscription and new taxes, then turning as riots against Christian churches and houses, could slow but not prevent the economic recovery of Aleppo in the second half of the 19th century--a process in which the Christian communities again played a major role.[7]
By 1900, Aleppo’s Christian communities reached 24 percent (26,600) of the urban population, two thirds of whom lived outside the city’s northern walls in the suburbs stretching west and east from Judayda.[8]
The following churches in Judayda are the successors to those visited by della Valle. The first four were in the shared compound, the fifth in the garden area to the east (see fig. 1).
Figure 1: (draft) Map of the churches of the Judayda Quarter. [Picture source: © 2019 Ross Burns] 