Мечеть Мустафы-паши

Mustafa Pasha Mosque
Rating 9110

16 september 2026Travel time: 3 july 2024
The Mustafa Pasha Mosque is a historic Ottoman-era mosque. It is located in the old fortress town of Rhodes, and although it is no longer open for regular use and worship (as is the case with the vast majority of Ottoman mosques in Rhodes, with the exception of the Ibrahim Pasha Mosque), it is occasionally made available to the Muslim community, especially for weddings. It stands in a small square right next to the town's hammam.
A marble inscription on the doorframe names its founder Sultan Mustafa III, who built the mosque around 1764 or 1765.
The mosque and the octagonal fountain in the courtyard were registered as a cultural monument by the Greek Ministry of Culture in 1948, shortly after the Dodecanese islands were annexed to Greece after several decades of Italian rule. The mosque's minaret was dismantled in 1973 and remains in ruins to this day. The mosque's large marble portico is also no longer there.
The bright yellow facade and roof were restored in the mid-2010s. The mosque has been used as a wedding office by the island's Muslim community since 1977.
The mosque is rectangular in shape, with internal dimensions of about 13.7 ×.10. 7 meters. Its roof has one large dome in the center, surrounded by two vaults in an east-west direction and two smaller shallow domes in the middle. The central dome covers the area facing the prayer niche, while rectangular vaults were chosen to accommodate the square shape of the roof. The use of vaults in Ottoman mosques, particularly in Rhodes, is quite rare, so the vault in the Mustafa Pasha Mosque is the only example of its kind on the entire island. The roofs of the vaults are covered with lead strips.
The prayer niche has a special shape compared to the niches in mosques on the rest of the island, as it is not hollowed out and is not very deep, less than a quarter of a circle. It is topped by a crescent-shaped arch and surrounded by two cylindrical columns with rectangular bases and Corinthian capitals on top. Nothing remains of the portico, once considered one of the largest in the mosques of Rhodes; its dimensions were about 17.5 ×.6. 5 m, it consisted of two naves and arches, which were surrounded by a total of four marble columns.
The minbar of the Sultan Mustafa Pasha Mosque is one of the largest surviving marble minbars on the island, made of pieces of gray marble and decorated with Arabic ornaments on top; below it is an inscription containing the shahada, that is, the Islamic declaration of faith.
Translated automatically from Ukrainian. View original

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