Maktab Anbar
مكتب عنبر
A grand 19th-century Damascene courtyard house built by a wealthy Jewish merchant, famed for its exceptional decoration, later converted into a school and then a heritage cultural center.
Maktab Anbar was built in the 1870s by the Anbar family, a wealthy Damascene Jewish merchant family, who employed the finest craftsmen to construct a residence that remains one of the grandest and most beautiful traditional Damascene houses surviving today.
The house is distinguished by exceptional interior decoration: hand-painted wooden ceilings in vivid colors, floors and walls clad in colored marble in the distinctive Damascene "ablaq" style that alternates black and white stone, and courtyard water fountains in the traditional Damascene manner that combines beauty with the practical function of cooling the air in summer.
After the Anbar family left, the house became an official school bearing the name "Maktab Anbar" (from which its current name derives), and a number of prominent 20th-century Syrian political and cultural figures graduated from it, before it was later converted into a cultural center hosting events and art exhibitions.
Maktab Anbar stands today as a prominent example of the richness of traditional Damascene residential architecture, and a witness to the religious and social diversity that has characterized Damascene society throughout its history.
For the visitor
Location: 33.5117, 36.3106 · Open on the map
Photos
Photos: Yazan.refai — via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA) · Dudley Miles — via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
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