Sidi Darghut Mosque: Tripoli’s First Ottoman-Style Mosque
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Libya
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Crusader, Knights Hospitaller, Ottoman
- Site type
- Religious
- Remains
- Mosque
On this page6 sections
History
Sidi Darghut Mosque is a Sunni mosque in Tripoli, Libya, built around 1560 by the Ottoman governor Dragut in the Ottoman architectural tradition. Also known as Turgut Reis, Dragut was a sixteenth-century Ottoman naval commander and governor. The mosque was erected soon after the Ottoman recapture of Tripoli from the Knights Hospitaller in 1551 and became the first Ottoman-style mosque built in the city.
Foundation and Ottoman Rule
Dragut personally selected the site, where a Hospitaller church or chapel had survived the siege of 1551. The Knights Hospitaller were a Catholic religious-military order that had controlled Tripoli before the Ottoman conquest. Local tradition holds that the church was left intact and incorporated into the new mosque.
Dragut was killed in 1565 during the Great Siege of Malta, the major Ottoman attack on Malta that year. His body was taken back to Tripoli and buried in the mosque, linking the building directly with the governor who had commissioned it.
Alterations and Modern History
In the early seventeenth century, Iskander Pasha altered the mosque. The work included remodeling its minaret in 1602 and constructing a hammam, or bathhouse, or possibly renovating an existing one.
The Superintendence of Monuments and Excavations carried out an accurate survey in 1921, and the mosque was restored during the 1920s. Bombardment during the Second World War severely damaged the central section, which had been the former church. Ali Mohamed Abu Zaian directed the reconstruction, but the rebuilt mosque differs from the original in several respects. During the Libyan civil violence of 2014, armed men made several attempts to vandalize the mosque, but they were repelled. The building remains an active place of worship.
Remains
Prayer Hall and Former Church
The mosque has a T-shaped prayer hall whose plan bears similarities to mosques in Anatolia. At its core was the small rectangular Hospitaller church, originally roofed with timber beams supporting a flat roof. When the building became a mosque, wings were added on both sides of the earlier structure. The prayer hall originally carried 27 small cupolas, while the postwar reconstruction increased the number to 32. This arrangement of numerous small cupolas is characteristic of traditional Libyan architecture and later became common in mosques built in the region.
Enclosure and Religious Features
Sidi Darghut Mosque stands within a trapezoidal enclosure that contains other facilities, including a cemetery. The complex has two mihrabs, niches indicating the direction of prayer. Several tombs lie near one of them, including those of Dragut and members of his family. A midha, a fountain or facility used for ritual ablution before prayer, serves the complex, which also includes a single minaret.
