Easy yemen Tours Places to See

The capital of the Republic of Yemen, is situated 2.286 metres above sea level. It is considered a real open-air museum, a city that has preserved the ancient architectural style which made it famous all over the world. In the mid-1970s UNESCO declared Sana’a one of the most endangered cities in the world.

In 1986 it was given World Heritage status, a testimony to the importance of its Mosques and minarets, schools, suqs (markets),

samsarahs (hostelry-warehouses), palaces, hammams (public baths) and the tower houses.

The region’s volcanic origin and regular rainfall make it fertile, and it enjoys a temperate climate throughout the year with the occasional sharp frost in the small hours of winter nights.

Sana’a has been of great importance since ancient times, as urban centre for the tribes: it lies at the intersection of two major antique trade routes, one of them linking the fertile upland plains, the other Marib and the Red Sea, and was a natural commercial centre.

The name probably derives from a South Arabian term meaning well fortified.

In AD 628 the last Persian viceroy, Badhan, converted to Islam but tolerated other religions.

While Christianity did not long survive the advent of Islam, a Jewish presence remained until the birth of the State of Israel.

Today Sana’a has many Mosques. The oldest, the Great Mosque (Al Jami Al Kabir) stand on the site of a Mosque built around AD 630, during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad.

Some of its columns are pre-Islamic and some from the Qalis Christian cathedral, though most of the present structure is twelfth-century.

Al Bakhiliyah mosque was built during the first Turkish occupation (1538-1630) and restored in XIX century during the second Ottoman period.

Its great domes are obviously of Turkish origin, but the brick minaret is characteristically Yemeni.

The Suq

The heart of Old City of Sana’a is the large and thriving suq, of pre-Islamic origin, extended from Bab al Yemen gate past the Great Mosque.

The suq has traditionally housed forty different crafts and trades.

At its hub, traders sell coffee beans and their husks for qishr, and raisins, corn and cereals. The spice market is redolent with rich aromas of cinnamon, cumin, cloves, fenugreek and incense.

The central part of the market was the Jewish quarter before it was moved to Bir al Azab suburb.

Its building reflect the ancient Jewish prohibition on higher building and none exceeds two storeys.

It was called the Suq al Milh (salt market) and now this name is applied to the whole suq.

It has been a centre for handicraft industries such jewellery and, most importantly, the making of the South Arabian dagger, the jambia. Among other crafts still practised are stone polishing and the manufacture of blades, leatherwork and carpentry.

Each craft had its own guild headman, elected locally to supervise regulation and trade.

The whole suq is presided over by the Sheikh as-Suq, or master of the market; another elected official, the Sheikh al-Layal, is in charge of security.

Sana’a tower house

In the Old City of Sana’a around 14.000 tower house rise up six, sometimes even nine, storeys high. The traditional social structures of the Yemen partly define the way a house is built.

In Sana’a’s Old City a house is typically built on a solid base of roughly hewn basalt blocks, dug half a metre into the ground, projecting a metre above.

The next levels are built of tufa and limestone of various shades, dressed smooth on the outside up to 6-10 metres above street level. They are surmounted for the nest three to six storeys by burnt clay bricks.

Much attention is paid to the decoration of the exterior walls and windows, with frequent use of pre-Islamic motifs, including Sabaean script, ancient zigzag symbols of water or snakes. But the most attractive aspects of Yemeni architecture is the window.

These often consist of two parts: a lower part, for viewing and ventilation, separated by a lintel from an upper part which serves as fanlight, filled with alabaster or glass to throw light inside the room.

Other windows include the shubaq, a perforated box structure jutting out from the wall, so that a women can look down into the street below without being seen.

Similar structure are used for storing earthenware jare to keep drinking water and foodstuffs cool. The motifs used for windows have evolved over the centuries.

Assemblages of half circles, circles and arches are pre-Islamic designs; other, particularly the rectangular windows and coloured-glass windows, arrive with various conquerors or through foreign influence.

The most common in the highlands were round windows glazed with alabaster, which in the warm late-afternoon sun remind one of honeycomb.

Locals often say that these window created an atmosphere like moonlight, and the natural veins in the alabaster do resemble the pattern of the moon.

In later timed the brightly coloured amariyah or takrim windows, with intricate geometrical designs, were introduced by the Ottomans.

These are made by spreading gypsum plaster on a wall, smoothing it and drawing pattern on it with a compass which are then cut out before the plaster dries. The window is then taken off the wall and laid flat.

Pieces of glasses are shaped to fit, and fixed into the cut-out holes before wet plaster is applied around the edges on the reverse.

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