Saint Petersburg Mosque

The Saint Petersburg Mosque, when opened in 1913, was the largest mosque in Europe outside Turkey. The mosque is situated in downtown St Petersburg. Its two minarets are 49 meters high and the dome is 39 meters high. It can accommodate up to five thousand worshippers.The founding stone was laid in 1910 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the reign of Abdul Ahat Khan in Bukhara. By that time, the Muslim community of the Russian then-capital exceeded 8,000 people. The projected structure was capable of accommodating most of them. The architect Nikolai Vasilyev patterned the mosque after Gur-e-Amir, the tomb of Tamerlane in Samarkand. Its construction was completed by 1921.

Worshippers are separated by gender during worship service; women worship on the upper floor, while the men worship on the ground floor. During World War II, the mosque was closed, and it was only reopened in 1956, during the Cold War.