The Statue of Saladin is an oversize equestrian bronze

Bronze

Bronze is a metal alloy consisting primarily of copper, usually with tin as the main additive. It is hard and brittle, and it was particularly significant in antiquity, so much so that the Bronze Age was named after the metal...

 statue depicting the Kurdish

Kurdish people

The Kurdish people, or Kurds , are an Iranian people native to the Middle East, mostly inhabiting a region known as Kurdistan, which includes adjacent parts of Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Turkey...

 Ayyubid Sultan Saladin

Saladin

Ṣalāḥ ad-Dīn Yūsuf ibn Ayyūb , better known in the Western world as Saladin, was an Arabized Kurdish Muslim, who became the first Sultan of Egypt and Syria, and founded the Ayyubid dynasty. He led Muslim and Arab opposition to the Franks and other European Crusaders in the Levant...

 located in front of the Citadel of Damascus in Damascus

Damascus

Damascus , commonly known in Syria as Al Sham , and as the City of Jasmine , is the capital and the second largest city of Syria after Aleppo, both are part of the country's 14 governorates. In addition to being one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, Damascus is a major...

, Syria

Syria

Syria , officially the Syrian Arab Republic , is a country in Western Asia, bordering Lebanon and the Mediterranean Sea to the West, Turkey to the north, Iraq to the east, Jordan to the south, and Israel to the southwest....

. The statue, designed by Syrian sculptor Abdallah al-Sayed and erected at municipal expense, was unveiled by the late Syrian president Hafez Assad in 1993 to mark the 800th anniversary of Saladin's death.

Description

The statue, which graces the main plaza of the city, depicts Saladin in the same pose and the same dress as he appears in a number of 19th-century Western depictions of the Crusades

Crusades

The Crusades were a series of religious wars, blessed by the Pope and the Catholic Church with the main goal of restoring Christian access to the holy places in and near Jerusalem...

. To either side of Saladin's horse stand two foot soldiers and a Sufi. Behind the horse kneel two crusaders, Guy of Lusignan

Guy of Lusignan

Guy of Lusignan was a Poitevin knight, son of Hugh VIII of the prominent Lusignan dynasty. He was king of the crusader state of Jerusalem from 1186 to 1192 by right of marriage to Sibylla of Jerusalem, and of Cyprus from 1192 to 1194...

 and Raynald of Châtillon

Raynald of Chatillon

Raynald of Châtillon was a knight who served in the Second Crusade and remained in the Holy Land after its defeat...

. According to the sculptor, Saladin appears not as an individual warrior but as a leader embodying a wave of popular feeling against the Franks

Franks

The Franks were a confederation of Germanic tribes first attested in the third century AD as living north and east of the Lower Rhine River. From the third to fifth centuries some Franks raided Roman territory while other Franks joined the Roman troops in Gaul. Only the Salian Franks formed a...

. The Sufi represents the simple religion of the people, the foot soldier represents the humble people all united with their hero under the banner of Islam

Islam

Islam . The most common are and .   : Arabic pronunciation varies regionally. The first vowel ranges from ~~. The second vowel ranges from ~~~...

.