Yenidze

On the western edge of Dresden's old centre, where the baroque skyline of domes and spires gives way to railway lines and the river, rises what looks at first glance like a mosque: a building of richly tiled walls, oriental windows and a great dome of coloured glass, with a slender minaret beside it. It is in fact a cigarette factory, the Yenidze, built between 1907 and 1909, and it remains one of the most unexpected industrial buildings in Europe.

The factory belonged to Hugo Zietz, a Jewish entrepreneur whose firm processed Oriental tobaccos, and it took its name from Yenidze in Ottoman Thrace, the region that supplied his leaf. Dresden at the time did not allow buildings that looked like factories within view of the historic centre, and Zietz answered the rule with theatre. His architect, Martin Hammitzsch, gave the building a Moorish Revival costume borrowed from mosques and from the Alhambra; the chimney became the minaret, the dome crowned the whole, and the exotic silhouette doubled as an advertisement for the exotic tobacco inside. Dresdeners soon called it the tobacco mosque.

The details reward a closer look. The building is 62 metres high, its dome alone 20 metres, glazed in coloured glass, and the façades are pierced by some 600 windows in a range of different shapes and sizes, set in richly tiled walls. The effect is less of a real mosque than of a dreamlike, turn-of-the-century fantasy of the East, built with the technical confidence of an industrial age.

In the bombing of 1945, when most of the buildings around it were destroyed, the Yenidze came through relatively unharmed. It stands today as a protected monument, restored in 1996 and converted to offices, while the dome was kept for public use: it now holds a restaurant with the highest beer garden in Dresden, open in summer, from which the whole city spreads out under the coloured glass.

Getting there

The Yenidze stands on Weißeritzstraße at the eastern edge of the Friedrichstadt district, about 1 km from the historic centre of Dresden and close to the Elbe. Dresden Airport (DRS) is about 9 km away. It is within walking distance of the old town.