Bab Kisan , where St. Paul escaped from Damascus

The Chapel of St. Paul, is a modern stone chapel in Damascus that incorporates materials from the Bab Kisan, the ancient city gate. After his baptism on the Street Called Straight in Damascus, St. Paul began the tireless preaching that would characterize the rest of his life, which led to a narrow escape from Damascus

The Jews conspired to kill him , but his followers took him by night and lowered him in a basket through an opening in the wall.

Paul himself later says that it was through a window that he escaped from certain death . In Paul’s time, the city of Damascus was surrounded by a wall pierced by seven gates. Bab Kisan is the gate on the southeastern side of Damascus and was dedicated to Saturn.

Bab Kisan, was the gate through which Paul escaped. This southeastern district of the city was not only very close to the start of the Roman road that St. Paul would have taken, but was also the part where, from the earliest times, the Christians used to live. Early Christian tradition identified a window beside the Kisan Gate.

The gate has been sealed and then reopened and restored several times. The blocks at the base of the gate are Roman, while the style of the arch is clearly typical of the Mameluke period. Bab Kisan originally was a church. It was seized in the year 1122 and converted into a mosque.

It was purchased together with the surrounding area by the Melkite Patriarch Gregory Joseph. On this land a chapel was erected, whose walls incorporate traces of the ancient gate and a small section of the wall.

The Chapel of St. Paul, go out the Eastern Gate from Straight Street and keep to the right. A 400-meter stretch of the ancient city wall stops at Bab Kisan, in front of the roundabout on the motorway to the airport.

The sober and austere design of the chapel blends in well with the antiquity of the walls. Two elegant and modern Chi-Rho monograms adorn the fortified towers that stand on other side of a fictitious window, similar in style to those of a medieval castle.

Source:Sacred Destination

Nada Haj Khider