Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque

Gazi Husrev-beg Mosque in Sarajevo is the largest historic mosque in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the most architecturally significant Ottoman religious building in the Western Balkans. The mosque was commissioned by Gazi Husrev-beg — the Ottoman governor of the Sanjak of Bosnia in the early sixteenth century — and completed in 1531, making it one of the earliest major Ottoman mosques constructed outside the imperial heartlands of Anatolia and Rumelia. The mosque was designed by the architect Acem Esir Ali, a student of the great Ottoman court architect Mimar Sinan, in the classical early-Ottoman style with a large central dome, four smaller corner half-domes, a porch with three smaller domes and a single minaret of forty-five metres in height. The mosque is the centrepiece of a much larger waqf (charitable endowment) complex established by Gazi Husrev-beg, which originally included a madrasa, a hanqah (Sufi lodge), a maktab (primary school), a kitchen for the poor (imaret), public baths (hamam), an inn (han), shops and an aqueduct supplying water to all of these — most of which still survive in some form in the surrounding Baščaršija old town. The mosque was significantly damaged by Serb shelling during the 1992-1995 siege of Sarajevo and was substantially restored in the years following the war. It remains the principal congregational mosque of the Bosniak Muslim community of Sarajevo.