A man kneels to pray in the Umayyad Mosque that sits in the heart of the ancient city of Damascus, Syria. The sacred spot where the mosque was built has served as a place of worship for over three millennia. Temples, mosquse and churches have all been built on this site and later destroyed as different rulers came into power. In the late fourth century, a church dedicated to John the Baptist was built in place of a massive temple to Jupiter that was built by the Romans in the first century A.D. Inside the present-day mosque is a shrine of John the Baptist, Prophet Yahia to Muslims, where tradition holds that the head of John is buried.

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