Description

Visoko lies on the banks of the Fojnica and Bosna rivers. Together with the neighbouring villages, the local community numbers some 45,000 inhabitants. That such a small town can be the home to a mosque of this size – and moreover, such a radically modern mosque – should wonder only those whose view of Europe is limited to the “Christian West” in which the influence of Muslim architecture is to be seen only in the Moorish palaces in southern Spain. In reality the culture of Islam influenced Europe for hundreds of years, not only in the southwest but also in southeastern Europe.

Like the rest of Bosnia, Visoko was part of the Ottoman Empire from 1463 to 1878. During this period its rulers established the spatial distribution of municipalities. In the 20th century, too, during socialist Yugoslavia, the city remained true to its identity and its history. In this one town there were a total of seven mosques. Of these, Sherefudin’s Mosque was by far the largest. The wooden building was used for Friday Prayers until its community outgrew it. Thanks to a degree of goodwill on the part of the state, in 1967 the Muslim community decided to build a new mosque on the same site.

The mosque stands on a triangular site with sides of roughly equal length. To the southwest and southeast it is surrounded by low dwellings with shops and workshops, all with red pitched roofs. While at the back the cemetery with its grass and grave posts separates the building from the houses, at the front the building is both set back and cut into the ground. The prayer hall itself is shaped like a quarter pyramid, the two minarets are both cylindrical and the annexe containing community and administration spaces is rectangular.

One reaches the mosque from the east edge of a market place. Without this open space, the building would not have such a strong presence in the dense network of streets. A path turns a quarter circle leading down past a grassy forecourt. The use of travertine on the floor and walls of the courtyard and white render for the in-situ concrete structure of the prayer hall serves two intentions: on the one hand the contrast between brown and white separates the lower and upper levels of the building, on the other it signifies a differentiation between the earthly and heavenly for the believers. The chthonic and the celestial are closely interconnected, as the courtyard – whose fountain for ablutions has four spouts for men and women – and prayer hall are connected via a full-height, transparent glass pane without frame or mullions, a most unique gesture not seen in other mosques.

By arranging the prayer hall below ground level, the hall is less susceptible to noise from outside and to the extreme heat or cold that is not uncommon in Bosnia. The entrance and wind lobby lie on axis with the path that leads towards the niche, which points in the direction of Mecca. The floor of the mosque is square with an edge length of 13 metres; the area on which the men sit and pray is carpeted light green. Stylised wooden “muquarnas”, stalactite-like elements which have been a traditional element in Islamic architecture since the 11th century, hang from the lintel of the narrow mihrab. The tall minbar stands to the right of the niche, the prayer leader’s chair crowned by a small baldachin. Both the mihrab and minbar have a reassuring vernacular quality, almost folkloristic, which is also evident in the delicate decoration around the fountain.

At the front of the room, the height of the plain white walls sinks to half the overall height of the space, at the rear to two-thirds thereof, intersecting with five sometimes smaller sometimes larger cupola-like skylights. The right angle that results where the latter meet the ceiling are deliberately aligned with important parts of the sacred enclosure, for example, the central axis from the portal to the qibla. The five “cupola” – a permanent reminder of the five daily prayers and five most important commandments of Islam – are so close to one another that the ceiling appears to sway and surge. Thrusting upwards, the slope of the ceiling reaches a maximum height of 15.8 metres inside, 13 metres outside, on its south corner.

The annexe on the left-hand side of the forecourt has two storeys: a passageway below passes through to the cemetery; above it lies the entrance to the women’s gallery from which one can see the mihrab and minbar. The small minaret stands in front of the annexe and encloses a spiral staircase that connects the lower floor with the upper floor. The Muezzin accesses the large minaret through the prayer hall. From inside the prayer hall a narrow stair ascends next to the minbar and leads to a room for meditation and contemplation and from there on to the minaret. With a total height of 26 metres, the cylinder of the minaret rises high above the houses and streets of Visoko below. The spire resembles a steel hood. Tubular green pipes surround its gridded screen shaped in the form of calligraphic Kufic characters that spell out the name of Allah across the roofs.

The prayer hall’s form, a quarter segment of a pyramid, derives from the form of earlier Bosnian mosques from the era of the Ottoman Empire and from the shape of the nearby mountain Visocica. Despite these specific regional influences, Sherefudin’s White Mosque, the design of which was completed much earlier in spring 1970, is an utterly modern example of sacred architecture. Clearly the building owes much to Le Corbusier, whose work the young architect grew to appreciate in his studies with his teacher Juraj Neidhardt. An even stronger parallel, particularly with regard to the broad and high sweep of its roof, seems to be a similarity with Alvar Aalto’s churches. The use of stone, plaster and metal as well as the colour combination of brown, white and green reminiscent of some of James Stirling’s details, presents historians with a conundrum.

Sherefudin’s White Mosque remains a singular attraction. The complexity of its architecture is unparalleled by late 20th century buildings designed elsewhere in Europe for Muslims. Were it not for the fact that the architect was awarded the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in 1983, the building would most probably have been forgotten: partly because, in the then socialist Yugoslavia, it lay off the beaten track and partly because its indebtedness to modernist heroes did not reflect what was fashionable in the eighties. Today, it is time that Sherefudin’s White Mosque is accorded the recognition it should long have had as an exemplary piece of modern Islamic architecture.

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Originally published in: Rudolf Stegers, Sacred Buildings: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2008.