Most people arrive at At-Turaif for dinner and leave without understanding that they have been standing in the ruins of a capital city that was deliberately destroyed by a foreign army — not sacked, not abandoned, but methodically dismantled with artillery and gunpowder so that it could never be used again.
It worked. The place was left largely empty for the better part of two centuries.
What it is on the list as
UNESCO inscribed it in 2010 as At-Turaif District in ad-Dir’iyah, under criteria four, five and six — architectural ensemble, traditional human settlement, and association with events and traditions of outstanding universal significance. The property itself covers 28.78 hectares. The buffer zone around it covers a further 237.95.
The citation dates the district’s founding to the fifteenth century, as the first capital of the Saudi dynasty, and identifies its significance as the seat of Saudi temporal power in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and of the reform movement that shaped the region.
Read also: Diriyah: the guide
Two dates, and why they are argued about
The Saudi state dates its own founding to 1727, when Imam Mohammed bin Saud became ruler of Diriyah. That is what Founding Day, on 22 February, commemorates, and it is the date the country now teaches.
A second date, 1744, circulates almost as widely, usually given as the year of the alliance between Mohammed bin Saud and the scholar Mohammed bin Abdul Wahhab. It is worth knowing that the UNESCO nomination for this site puts that alliance in 1745, and that Saudi Arabia’s own reference works describe the state’s establishment as coinciding with the adoption of the call rather than being founded by it.
The distinction is not pedantry. One version makes a religious alliance the origin of the state; the other makes it an event within a state that already existed. Standing in At-Turaif, where the palace and the mosque are joined by a bridge built at an upper level so that the Imam could cross between them, you can see why the question has never been purely academic.
Source: Heritage Commission, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Salwa Palace
The largest structure on the site runs to around ten thousand square metres across seven separate units — reception and hospitality halls, the Imam’s residential quarters, the administration of the state, and an attached mosque. It was built in 1765 by Imam Abdulaziz bin Mohammad bin Saud, in mud brick, and it was the second seat of government after the family moved up from Gasibah.
Inside were councils of government, guardhouses, storerooms, security quarters, meeting halls and rooms for receiving guests. Imam Saud bin Abdulaziz later added the raised bridge linking the palace directly to the mosque. It was abandoned in 1818 and it is now a museum, open in the evening, with a projection piece thrown onto its walls after dark.
Around it stand the other named palaces — Saad bin Saud, Ibrahim bin Saud, Abdullah — and the At-Turaif mosque, with its mud walls and wooden roofs, looking down into Wadi Hanifah.
Source: xiquinhosilva, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
How it was built
The method is worth understanding because you will see it quoted, loosely, in every new hotel in central Saudi Arabia.
Limestone foundations and lower structures. Mud brick and palm wood above. A clay mud render over the whole. Stone columns, plastered and limewashed. Keel arches. Internal courtyards. High ventilation openings, cut as triangles in the upper parts of the walls. Wooden lintels painted with geometric motifs. Sanitary towers rising above the roofline.
The clay came straight out of the bed of Wadi Hanifah below, and the water from wells. The city was made of the ground it stood on, which is why artillery worked so well on it and why rebuilding it has been possible at all.
1818
The Ottoman campaign under Ibrahim Pasha besieged Diriyah for seven months. When it fell in 1818 the city was destroyed by artillery and gunpowder. The last ruler of the first Saudi state, Imam Abdullah bin Saud bin Abdulaziz, had ruled for four years.
The record kept by ICOMOS notes destruction across the sieges of 1818 to 1819 and again in 1821, after which the site was largely abandoned until the twentieth century. Mud brick left standing in a wadi does not last a century without maintenance. Most of what fell, dissolved.
The restoration, and the honest question about it
Major rehabilitation began in the 1980s, when the Department of Antiquities restored much of the city walls, and it has continued at increasing scale since.
ICOMOS, evaluating the site for World Heritage listing, recorded plainly that these interventions had raised questions about authenticity and about whether the reconstructions accurately reflected original conditions. That assessment sits in the public file for the inscription, and it was made by the body whose recommendation secured the listing.
This is the interesting problem at At-Turaif and it has no clean answer. A mud-brick city cannot be conserved the way a stone one can; leave it alone and in fifty years there is a mound. Rebuild it and you are making choices about which century you are rebuilding towards. Every visible wall here is somewhere on that spectrum, and the site does not always tell you where.
Go anyway, and go with the question in your head. It makes the walk better rather than worse. The parts that are unmistakably old — the eroded coursing low down, the stubs of wall that were not worth rebuilding — are more affecting for standing next to the parts that are new.
What to see inside
Five museums sit within the walls, covering the history of Diriyah from the fourth century onwards, the Arabian horse, traditional architecture, military history including the battle for the city, and daily life. The architecture museum is the one to prioritise if you only have time for one; it explains the walls you are standing between.
Read also: The best table in Riyadh faces a ruin
Why it matters more than it looks
It is easy to walk At-Turaif and see a restored heritage attraction with a good restaurant terrace opposite. What is actually here is the physical evidence of a state that was destroyed and then re-established twice, in a country that until very recently did not present that history to visitors at all.
The mud is the least interesting thing about it. The fact that it is open, lit, ticketed and full of people every evening is the story.
Featured Image Source: Heritage Commission, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
