Europe

[Visited: July 2020]

We park a few hundred metres away from the painted mosque of Tetovo, walk back the street, and enter the compound of the mosque. The name of course already says something: mosques are not often painted. We walk around the building with geometric paintings on all walls. We see rectangulars in orange and green, with a many-pointed star in the middle, and flowers above and below it. The minaret is plain stone without any paint. But when we come to the entrance of the mosque, we see much more intricate paintings. The ceiling has a big, colourful star of David, which is common in Ottoman churches. In fact, this is the Khatam Suleimani, or the Seal of Solomon. After removing our shoes, a caretaker comes to open the old, wooden door for us. Once inside, we are speechless, our eyes move from one side to the other at the beauty we see.
Above the thick carpet (very common in mosques), we see intricately painted walls and ceiling. There are floral motifs, but whole cities are depicted, too. The mihrab, the niche indicating the direction of prayer, is also decorated with elegant floral paintings around it. We walk to the corner on the same wall, where we see a painting of the Kaaba in Mecca: a unique feature in any mosque. We look up at the ceiling, which has a large circle with twelve medallions, with either a building or flowers in them. There are details like painted columns out of which leaves branch. I am searching my memory as hard as I can, and have visited many mosques between Morocco and China, but I have never seen anything like this. It begs the question: why here? Why this mosque? Wy not the omnipresent tiles, but paint? Did the artist get inspiration from churches in the region, how was this accepted by the muslim community?
Fact is that the mosque, which is called Šarena Džamija in Macedonian, was financed by the two sisters Hurshida and Mensure, and completed in 1438. Some 30.000 eggs were used for both the paint and the glaze. Abdurrahman Pasha, an art lover who liked Tetovo, was involved in the reconstruction of the mosque in 1833. The exterior painting has been restored in the 2010. The caretaker, obviously used to visitors, taking the donation we want to give for the mosque and pocketing it himself, allows us to walk upstairs, from where we get a better view of the ceiling and the upper part of the paintings on the walls. It truly is a masterpiece. When we finally leave the mosque, we find a türbe, an octagonal building holding the tombs of the two sisters who commissioned this marvellous painted mosque of Tetovo.

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Painted mosque (North Macedonia)

Painted mosque > North Macedonia > Europe

[Visited: July 2020]

Around the World in 80 Clicks