Bajrakli Mosque
The Bajrakli Mosque ( named in Turkish as Bayraklı, bayrak is Turkish for “flag” and Bayraklı means “with flag”) is a mosque in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. It is located in Gospodar Jevremova Street in the neighbourhood of Dorćol. It was built around 1575, and is the only mosque in the city out of the 273 that had existed during the time of the Ottoman Empire’s rule of Serbia.
During the occupation of Serbia by the Austrians (between 1717 and 1739), it was converted into a Roman Catholic church; but after the Ottomans retook Belgrade, it was returned to its original function.
It was damaged after being set on fire on 18 March 2004, during that year’s unrest in Kosovo, in violent protest to the burning of Serbian churches in Kosovo, but it was later repaired.
Out of former more than 200 mosques and many small Islamic places of worship the so called mesdzid, the Bajrakli Mosque in 11, Gospodar Jevremova Street is the only remaining and active example of Islamic religious architecture in Belgrade. It is situated on a slope towards the Danube River, near the junction with Kralja Petra Street. Once it dominated in the atmosphere of mostly ground floor houses in the busy commercial and craft town district of Belgrade, the so-called Zejrek.
Descriptions of Belgrade of the 17th century were preserved by Ottoman travel writer Evliya Celebi in which he vividly described the appearance of the town in the period of Turkish rule, with various buildings of Islamic architecture. In the second half of the 19th century the Bajrakli Mosque was described by historians and travel writers Konstantin Jireček, Giuseppe Barbanti Brodano,as well as by archaeologist and ethnologist Felix Kanitz. It is assumed that today’s Bajrakli Mosque was built on the place of an older mesdzid, probably in the second half of the 17th century, as the endowment of the Turkish ruler Sultan Suleiman II (1687—1691). It was originally named after former renewers, Čohadži-Hajji Alija’s and later Hussein Ćehaja’s mosque, while the current name was given in the late 18th [4] or in the early 19th century. In it, as in the main mosque, there was the muvekit, the man who calculated the exact time of AH according to the Islamic calendar (which began in 622, i.e. in the year of Hijra, the year during which the emigration of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina) occurred to determine sacred days, regulated clock mechanism and put the flag on the minaret, to signal the simultaneous beginning of the prayer to other Islamic places of worship in the town of Belgrade. Between 1717 and 1739, during the Austrian rule, it served as a cathedral Catholic church, but its original function was renewed in 1741 when the Ottomans returned to Belgrade. The mosque was renewed in the 19th century by the rulers of the Obrenovic dynasty, Prince Mihailoand King Aleksandar Obrenović.
