Great Mosque of Agadez
Mosquée d'Agadez
Interesting facts
- The 27-metre minaret is square in plan and rises as a truncated pyramid, its edges gently wavering rather than ruler-straight.
- The wooden beams bristling from the minaret are built-in permanent scaffolding: they carry the platforms used when the community renews the mud coating.
- A tight staircase inside the minaret climbs to the top, growing narrower the higher it rises, and ends at a viewpoint over the old town.
- Its bricks were shaped from a mix of mud, straw and pebbles and simply left to dry in the desert sun.
- Traditions disagree on the builder: one names a scholar called Zakariya, said by some to have come from Baghdad, another a scholar from the Algerian region.
- The Sultanate of Aïr, whose capital Agadez became, was founded in the early 15th century by the Sandal, one of the first great Tuareg confederations to arrive.
- Agadez today counts four Friday mosques and some 79 neighbourhood mosques, but the great mosque remains the best known of them all.
Why it is worth it
The minaret of the Great Mosque of Agadez rises about 27 metres above the flat roofs of the old town, a tapering tower of sun-dried mud brick bristling with projecting wooden beams. It is the tallest structure ever built in mud brick, and for centuries it has been the landmark by which people find their way through the city on the southern edge of the Sahara; at times it also served as a lookout.
Agadez grew up in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Sultanate of Aïr was established and Tuareg groups settled within the town, keeping the outlines of their old encampments. The irregular street plan that resulted survives today, and the historic centre, a crossroads of the trans-Saharan caravan trade, is made up of eleven quarters of earthen houses around a group of palaces and religious buildings. In 2013 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as the Historic Centre of Agadez. The city itself is the capital of its region and of the traditional Sultanate of Agadez, and it is known for its camel market, its silversmiths and leatherworkers, and the Agadez cross, a Tuareg pendant that carries the city's name.
The mosque's early history is told in several versions. The commonly given date is 1515, the period when the Songhai Empire took control of the city, though some historians argue that a Friday mosque without a minaret stood here earlier, before the Sultan's Palace opposite it was built in the mid-fifteenth century. Accounts credit its construction to a scholar from abroad, and local tradition holds that the builder raised it in a single night, between the evening prayer and dawn. The minaret was rebuilt in the 1840s in the same form. Its building technique resembles that of the earthen mosques of Timbuktu, and one long-held view is that Tuareg builders went to Timbuktu to learn the method.
Getting there
The mosque stands in the historic centre of Agadez, Niger. Agadez has its own airfield, Mano Dayak International Airport (AJY), on the edge of town. The nearest other airport is Zinder Airport (ZND), about 370 km to the south in a straight line; Niger's main international gateway is Niamey (NIM), far to the southwest. Agadez is linked to the south of the country by road.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Agadez Mosque is a prominent mosque in Agadez, Tchirozerine Department, Niger. It was made of clay and is the tallest mud-brick structure in the world. The Agadez mosque is the most prominent religious center located in the central part of the Republic of the Niger, and has been a place of worship for centuries.
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