THERE is a photograph of a small town in Yemen taken a century ago by a German photographer called Hermann Burchardt. It is one in a series of remarkable pictures taken during an expedition through the southern tip of the Arabian peninsula, where the Red Sea washes down between the port of Aden and the Horn of Africa and out into the Indian Ocean. The photograph, only slightly scratched and fogged with age, shows the town of Rada sitting on a broad plain beneath a range of mountains that stretch row upon row into the distance. The plain is divided into neat, rectangular wheat fields that seem to grow right into Rada’s high street. Most of the dozen or so houses are of the familiar Yemeni design: Built of baked brick or adobe, narrow, four or five stories tall and dotted with arched windows.
In the middle of the photograph is a vast building that dwarfs its neighbors in scale and accomplishment. Even in a country with Yemen’s remarkable history of building, this complex stands out. It is a white, three-storied palace with two towers, six close-knit, bulging domes on the roof, crenellations along its ramparts, long arched balconies, ornate wooden window boxes and remnants of fine stone carving. What Burchardt could not have realized is that inside, hidden under layers of grime and thick whitewash, were walls of the most delicate stucco carving and some of the most extraordinary paintwork ever found in a mosque.
Twenty-four years ago, decades after Burchardt photographed the palace known as the Amiriya of Rada, and five centuries after it was first built, a team of archaeologists and restorers began cleaning and repairing the site. Last year the little-known palace was reopened in its original condition and now the Amiriya is a prized architectural treasure, regarded again as one of the world’s finest painted mosques.
The Amiriya is dated 1504 and was part mosque, part religious school and part private residence of Sultan Amir ibn Abd Al-Wahhab, one of the last Yemeni rulers from the Tahirid dynasty and an enormously wealthy man who had made his fortune trading with India out of Aden. His palace, with its domes and archways, echoes the architecture of Mughal Delhi and may even have been built with Indian designers. In 1517, not long after his palace was built, Sultan Amir was killed fighting an invading Egyptian army allied to his Yemeni rivals. The Amiriya was abandoned, left by Yemen’s new rulers to collapse into the sand.
By the time Burchardt photographed it four centuries later, it was in a sad state. The Amariya had sunk into further disrepair by the early 1980s, when it was spotted by an Iraqi archaeologist, Selma Al-Radi. She had just finished her PhD and had been hired by the Yemeni government to design its national museum. One day she traveled the three-hour drive south-west from the capital Sana’a to Rada, to visit a Dutch team trying to rebuild the town’s almost medieval infrastructure. “I went down with them once just for the hell of it, and I saw this building and said, ‘Wow, this we’ve got to save.’ So I went rushing back to the Dutch embassy and said, ‘Help, help, help, you’ve done everything in Rada from the roads to the waterworks to I don’t know what else — please, you’ve got to do this monument because we can’t afford to lose it.’ And they said yes.”
Now 67, Al-Radi was born in Baghdad and brought up in Delhi, where her father was the Iraqi ambassador. Part of her initial attraction to the Amiriya was its similarity to the architecture of Delhi that she remembered from her childhood. After studying at Cambridge, then working at the national museum in Iraq, she has worked for the past quarter of a century at Amiriya. “I had no idea it was going to take that long,” she says.
Work began in April 1982, at first simply to restore the foundations and the outside walls. The palace had been held together with a traditional mortar, a man-made limestone known in Arabic as qudad. It originated in Yemen and was later used by the Romans and then in India. Although qudad is immensely strong, large parts had broken off because local warring tribes would fire their guns into the walls as a way to seal peace agreements. Shopkeepers had taken to using the lower floors for storage or for dumping rubbish, which, by the time Al-Radi came across the Amiriya, lay many meters thick on the ground.
Al-Radi found an elderly master builder, Izzi Muhammad Gas’a, the one craftsman in the area who could remember the almost forgotten technique of qudad. “We walked around the building. He looked at it and said, ‘I’m an old man and this is the last thing I will do and I will finish it, at least structurally.’ And that’s what he did.” Gas’a died in 1987, but by then, true to his word, he had overseen the repair of the outside of the Amiriya.
It wasn’t easy to convince the townspeople that they should support the restoration project. The first Yemeni archaeologist who worked with Al-Radi ran into trouble with local officials, who locked him up in jail several times. His successor was Yahya Al-Nasiri, a member of one of the richer families of the town, who had studied archaeology in Poland. As a schoolboy, Al-Nasiri had taken classes inside one of the towers of the Amiriya. There was no paper or ink; instead, the children used a chalk-like paste and wrote using a finger on small blackboards.
Relying on the memory of Gas’a, the workers tried to produce their own qudad, experimenting with proportions of slaked lime and stone aggregate. “The only way to test if it works,” says Al-Nasiri, “is to throw it at a wall. If it sticks, it is good. If it falls off, then it’s bad.” Pounding, applying, smoothing and polishing the qudad was a painfully laborious task. “When we did the roof, it was fantastic,” says Al-Radi. “We had rows and rows of people just polishing. You are creating your own limestone. It’s very time-consuming and costly, but it lasts — the one thing that had left this building standing was the qudad.” It had to be waterproofed with a layer of animal fat and then touched up occasionally until it hardened and developed its marble sheen.
The prize of the Amiriya lay within the mosque on the upper floor. A wide stairway leads upstairs to a large, columned courtyard lined on either side with small study rooms. At the northern end is the prayer room, with its six-domed roof, delicate stucco carving and 600 square meters of paintwork. Starting at head height are large filigree panels that were hidden under many layers of whitewash. “I was really cross when I first saw it,” says Al-Radi. “I thought, God, what have they done? But I’m thrilled they did it. It preserved everything.” She and the team spent nearly three years using small scalpels and dental tools to scratch the whitewash off the ornately carved mihrab wall, which faces toward Makkah.
In the corridor outside the prayer room, the stucco had decayed so badly that it needed to be almost completely rebuilt. The team hired Ali Hamood, one of the finest stucco workers in the district, to recreate the intricate carving. It took him a year to cover the ceiling of just one 15 meter-long corridor.
At the same time, a team of Italian restorers from Rome was working on the paintings in the domes above and on the higher reaches of the walls. The tempera painting is extraordinary, the jewel of the Amiriya. There are rich reds, blues, greens and oranges, neat geometrical patterns and ornate floral designs. There is elaborate Qur’anic calligraphy and the simple square designs of Kufic script. All of it was cloaked in thick grime from the oil lamps and cooking fires that burned underneath it for centuries. The Italian team worked for several years, cleaning and protecting, wiping down the paintwork with soft-bristle brushes and swabbing with dry sponges, until the layers of soot and dirt were gradually removed.
“We couldn’t believe the colors when they started coming out,” says Al-Radi. “It was literally as if it were done yesterday. There was so little damage.” She believes the variety of the different shapes and designs revealed amounts to a pattern book left by the original workers. “I think the painters who worked on it said to themselves, ‘Who knows when we’ll get another chance to do it. Let’s put everything we know into it.’ It’s spectacular.”
After so many years on one site, Al-Radi promised herself she would take a break from archaeology. But already she is being tempted — by a project to restore a palace of the 11th-century Yemeni Queen Arwa in the town of Jibla. “This one’s very easy,” she says. “It’s got no stucco, it’s mainly structural. But it’s in a hell of a bad state... There are so many projects still to do. We’ve hardly even started in Yemen.”
