A Caliph Reportedly Rode a Donkey Up This Spiral Tower, and Almost Nobody Alive Has Followed Him

Al-Mutawakkil, the Abbasid caliph who commissioned the Great Mosque of Samarra in 848 CE, is said to have ridden a donkey up the ramp of its spiral minaret to enjoy the view from the top, a detail that tells you exactly how wide and gentle that ramp was designed to be. Today the climb is on foot only, and getting to attempt it at all requires clearing checkpoints, arranging a local fixer, and accepting genuine security risk that no amount of research changes. This entry exists to describe what the site is, not to talk anyone into a trip advisories currently warn against.

Being honest about access before anything else

Samarra sits about 125 km north of Baghdad in Salah ad-Din province, and as of 2026 essentially every Western government maintains a Level 4, do-not-travel advisory for Iraq, with Samarra specifically flagged due to its history as a flashpoint city and its proximity to militia checkpoints. Independent travel is not realistic. Visitors who do go typically travel with an organized tour or a vetted local guide who has cleared arrangements in advance, and even then access is usually restricted to the Malwiya minaret itself rather than the broader archaeological city, which spans a much larger and less secured area. If you’re researching this site for a trip rather than out of historical interest, talk to a specialist operator with current on-the-ground relationships, not a general travel booking site, and expect the itinerary to be shaped entirely around what’s cleared on the day you arrive.

Why this city matters even though so little survives whole

Samarra briefly became the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate under Caliph Al-Mu’tasim starting in 836 CE, largely to get the caliph’s Turkic military guard away from the population of Baghdad, whose relationship with the soldiers had turned hostile. What resulted was one of the largest and most ambitious planned cities of the early medieval world, stretching some 40 km along the Tigris in places, before the capital moved back to Baghdad in 892 CE under Al-Mu’tamid and Samarra’s population declined sharply. UNESCO’s listing recognizes both the surviving structures and the vast unexcavated archaeological footprint beneath them, which makes this less a “ruins you walk through” site and more a landscape-scale record of Abbasid urban planning that’s still being studied.

The Great Mosque and its minaret, described accurately

The Great Mosque of Samarra was completed in 851 CE under Al-Mutawakkil and was, at the time, the largest mosque in the world; only its outer walls and the Malwiya minaret survived the Mongol destruction that followed Hulagu Khan’s invasion in the 1250s. The Malwiya Tower itself stands 52 meters high with a base roughly 33 meters wide, its spiral ramp winding counter-clockwise to the summit, a design some scholars trace back to Mesopotamian ziggurat forms rather than to any earlier minaret tradition. It’s the single most photographed structure from Samarra precisely because it’s the most intact; most of the rest of the Abbasid-era palace and residential city exists as low earthen mounds and foundation traces rather than standing architecture.

What else made up the city, and correcting a name

Al-Mutawakkil also built a separate mosque known as the Abu Dulaf Mosque, north of the main city, on a similar plan to the Great Mosque with its own smaller spiral minaret, worth knowing about since guides sometimes conflate the two structures. The Qubbat al-Sulaybiyya, a domed octagonal mausoleum, is one of the few surviving Abbasid-era funerary structures anywhere and is believed to hold the tombs of several caliphs, though its precise attribution is still debated among archaeologists rather than settled fact.

What a realistic visit actually looks like

On the rare organized visits that do happen, expect to surrender your passport or ID at a checkpoint outside the city in exchange for a visitor pass, which you trade back on the way out, and expect the visit itself to be tightly time-boxed around the Malwiya minaret rather than a leisurely multi-site tour. Bring water and sun protection; there’s no visitor infrastructure, no shade, and no facilities at the site itself.

The gotcha

Photography near checkpoints and military positions is a serious problem, not a minor faux pas; do not photograph anything beyond the monument itself without explicit permission from whoever is accompanying you, since misunderstandings here carry real consequences rather than just an awkward conversation. If your guide or fixer tells you a particular angle or building is off-limits, treat that as final rather than negotiable.