Blue Mosque, Yerevan
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The Blue Mosque (Armenian: Կապույտ մզկիթ; Turkish: Gök Camii; Persian: مسجد کبود; Azerbaijani: Göy məscid) is a mosque in Yerevan, Armenia. It was built in 1766 during the reign of Hussein Ali, the khan of Erivan (and is therefore sometimes referred to as "the mosque of Hussein Ali"). It was the largest of eight functioning mosques in Yerevan when the city was captured by Russia in 1827. The complex consisted of a main prayer room, a library, a medresse with 28 cells, all organised around a courtyard, with the overall complex occupying 7,000 square metres of land. It originally had four 24-metre high minarets - however, three of these had been demolished by the 1950s. Due to the secularist policies of the Soviet government, religious services at the Blue Mosque were forbidden. In 1931 the building was turned into the Museum of the City of Yerevan. [1] In the second half of the 1990s, the mosque underwent a heavy and aesthetically damaging restoration funded by Iran [2], and Islamic religious services have now resumed.
