Travel to Crimea!

Cuma-Cami

Hello dear Guests of  Traveltocrimea agency!

Cuma-Cami, Evpatoria’s Islamic mosque, is shrouded in mystery and numerous legends revolve around its creation. One version has it that the mosque was built overnight by Seid-Bakli Efendi. Another story holds that its architect was Men-Arslan, court painter and jester of Crimean khan Mengli-Ghiray, while the third legend tells that this building was launched as an Orthodox church but subsequently changed into an Islamic Mosque.

In reality however, it was 62 years old Khodza Sinan, one of the foremost oriental architects of his time, who arrived on the request of Crimean Khan Devlet-Ghiray in 1552 from Istanbul in order to build the biggest and most beautiful Tatar mosque on the peninsula Crimea in the eastern part of Evpatoria, just by the Black Sea.

Tatar girl in national clothes

This leads to the question why the Khan chose Evpatoria, as opposed to Bakhchisarai, the Islamic centre of the time, as a location for this Mosque. Evpatoria, or, by that time called Gesliev, wasn’t just any provincial town, but a wholesale trade centre with a population of about 10 thousand people, 670 shops, 10 windmills and a port allowing up to 1000 ships to anchor. It was this city that the Khan foresaw to succeed Istanbul as a hub of Islamic culture by moving Crimea’s Islamic centre from Bakhchisarai to Evpatoria.

Despite this counting as his 77^th creation, Sinan designed Cuma-Cami formidably and in such a manner that its skyline resembled that of Istanbul’s Blue Mosque Aia-Sofia. In 1564, Cuma-Cami, literally ‘Friday’ Mosque, was completed and Mehmet-Ghiray II started as the first of 18 Crimean Khans to rule from its premises.

As Crimean history took turns with the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–1774, Şahin Giray, according to Catherine II the ‘most gentle Tatar, I have ever seen.. very talented, good-looking’ abdicated and agreed for the khanate to be incorporated into the Russian imperial egis. When after exile in St Petersburg he was granted his wish to return to his birthplace in Turkey, he

was met as a potential traitor, put into a bag and dumped into the sea.

Long after the Crimean Khanate ceased to exist with the annexation of Crimea and other parts of the Ottoman empire by Russia, Cuma-Cami continues to strike with beauty and is meanwhile the only well-preserved twin-dome mosque in Europe.

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