Sixty Dome Mosque
Interesting facts
- Khan Jahan Ali, the mosque's builder, died on 25 October 1459, the same year his great mosque was completed.
- Khan Jahan Ali is believed to have been of Turkic origin, a former noble of the Tughlaq court who moved to Bengal after Timur sacked Delhi in 1398.
- The mosque stands on the eastern bank of the Ghora Dighi, a huge water tank about 230 by 460 metres dug under Khan Jahan Ali.
- Besides serving for prayer and teaching, the building also served as Khan Jahan Ali's court.
- The round corner minarets are two storeys high, with a spiral staircase inside and a window at mid-height for light and air.
- The eleven mihrabs on the west wall are decorated with carved stone and terracotta, while the floor is laid in brick.
- The ruins were surveyed by the Archaeological Survey in 1895, and in 1907–08 part of the roof and 28 of the domes were restored.
- The surrounding city is said to have had some 360 mosques, and the nearby Ronvijoypur Mosque has the widest dome in Bangladesh, about 11 metres.
Why it is worth it
Inside the Sixty Dome Mosque, rows of slender stone columns recede into half-light in every direction, carrying a sea of brick arches and low domes. Despite its name, the roof has 77 domes over the prayer hall and 81 in all if the four corner towers are counted, held up by exactly sixty pillars; one explanation is that the Bengali name, Shat Gombuj, began as a "sixty-pillared" mosque and drifted over time to "sixty-domed". Built between 1442 and 1459, it is the largest surviving mosque of the Bengal Sultanate period in Bangladesh and the centrepiece of the Mosque City of Bagerhat, inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985.
The mosque was the work of Khan Jahan Ali, a saint and general who in the mid-fifteenth century founded a Muslim settlement on the edge of the Sundarbans mangrove forest, during the reign of Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud Shah. The city he created, then called Khalifatabad, was furnished with more than a dozen mosques, and their remains lie scattered through the countryside around present-day Bagerhat, a district town in Khulna Division in the southwest of the country. This great mosque served not only for prayer but also as a madrasa and a hall of assembly.
The building is an oblong of brick measuring about 45 by 31 metres outside, with walls nearly two metres thick that taper slightly as they rise. Its round corner towers, almost detached from the walls and capped with small cupolas, look like the bastions of a fortress and recall the Tughlaq architecture of Delhi, while the central row of seven roofs, four-sided and pitched like a village hut, shows a Bengali form being translated into masonry. Eleven arched doorways open in the east wall and seven on each of the north and south sides; inside, the hall is divided into seven aisles and eleven bays. The west wall holds eleven mihrabs, ten of them blind, with the central one projecting outside. Two of the corner towers were used for the call to prayer.
Getting there
The mosque lies about 5 km from the centre of Bagerhat, in Khulna Division, Bangladesh. The nearest airport by straight line is Barisal Airport (BZL), about 60 km to the east across the river delta; Jessore Airport (JSR) lies about 80 km to the northwest beyond the city of Khulna. Bagerhat is connected to Khulna by road.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
The Sixty Dome Mosque is a historical mosque, located in Bagerhat, in the Khulna Division of Bangladesh. It is a part of the Mosque City of Bagerhat, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. It is the largest mosque in Bangladesh from the Bengal Sultanate period (1352–1576). It was built by Khan Jahan Ali, the governor of the Sundarbans. It has been described as "one of the most impressive Muslim monuments in the whole of South Asia." It is situated approximately 4.8 kilometres (3 mi) from the main town of Bagerhat; and nearly 320 km (200 mi) from Dhaka. Despite its nomenclature, the mosque has 81 domes that are supported by sixty columns.
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