The Citadel of Ajloun

It's a fixer-upper with a great view.

We invested the middle of the day to a trip to the north of Jordan to visit the city and fortress of Ajloun. This is a well-resurrected Islamic castle built during the Crusader period at the orders of Saladin. While N. and I have visited most of the southern touristy sites over the decades, for some reason we skipped the north of Jordan until this year. This was wrong on our part, for the countryside is quite impressive, mountainous and scenic. It also holds the second-largest city in Jordan, Irbid, a university town.

I won't give the history of Ajloun here—Wikipedia and the Jordan tourist agency sites do fairly well in describing the background of the Islamic castle's development. As any threat from the great Crusader castle at Karak disappeared with its fall to the Ayyubids only two years after Ajloun's construction, the fortress never had a chance to fight back the Crusaders, its apparent original purpose. It did, however, suffer slings and arrows through the centuries in internecine fighting, and was captured and severely damaged by the Mongols. It had mostly an administrative function in latter centuries. Two earthquakes (in early nineteenth and twentieth centuries) didn't help.

I was surprised at how little I could find on this pre-Islamic history of the fortress and the important, strategic mountain it sits upon. While not talked about much, it was earlier a Roman construct and the site of a Byzantine church, the latter revealed through recent excavations, but not mentioned much officially. History has so much baggage in this region that you can pretty much select from and interpret events as they suit your previous convictions. A cursory inspection provides evidence of several reconstructions and a varying quality of stone work.

Scampering about the ruins makes a great afternoon—there are a lot of nooks and crannies to investigate—and we had exceptional weather for it. Jordan has done a good job in making this a comfortable tourist site, and an excellent work of reconstruction where necessary. We were a bit off season, but there were a number of groups passing through and the castle was well staffed with guides and security. A. tells me that they once picnicked on the castle grounds, but this is no longer allowed.

One area where Jordan could put additional effort: directional signs to the castle. It's a little unfair for me to mention this, as they have done a great deal already in basic highway signage, but even Jordan residents get lost trying to find their way to the citadel. Advice: get good directions.

For those on a pilgrimage, there is a Catholic school, church and shrine on the route to Ajloun where the Virgin Mary is said to have performed several miracles in recent years. One miracle was said to involve the cure of cancer for a Moslem woman, which, in a small sense, illustrates the religious tolerance evident in this country.

The roadsides are packed with vegetable stands, pottery factories, bakeries and every imaginable shop. On the way back, we stopped at one of the villages and bought some fresh goat-milk lebaney, a yogurt-based product that I dearly, dearly love, some bread from the local bakery as it came out of the oven, and some of the local white cheese (the latter must be soaked overnight in water as it comes naturally with a degree of salt that will still your heart). It made a great snack as we drove back into Amman as dusk fell.