NAMAZGAH MOSQUE

Hard to miss with its four minarets of 50 m high, this mosque (Xhamia e Namazgjasë) is the largest in the Balkans. It is also called Great Mosque of Tirana (Xhamia e Madhe e Tiranës). Financed by Turkey, its construction began in January 2015 in the presence of Turkish President Recep Erdoğan. After many legal hurdles and construction delays, it was scheduled to open in late 2022. This old project born in 1992 was expected by the Sunni community. The country's other three major religions already had complexes built after the fall of communism in the capital: the International Bektashi Center, the Orthodox Cathedral and the Catholic Cathedral. The Sunnis, who are in the majority in Tirana, had only eight mosques, while the Orthodox and Catholics had more than 120 churches. As for the Et'hem Bey mosque, historic and central, it can only accommodate 60 worshippers. The new building, whose name means "place of prayer" in Persian(Namāzgāh) and Turkish(Namazgâh), is of much larger proportions. This neo-Ottoman style building is covered with a central dome 30 m high. It has an interior surface of 10,000^m2 with two prayer halls each able to accommodate between 2,000 and 2,500 worshippers. Also planned are a conference room, a library, ten rooms for Quranic instruction, a restaurant and a museum dedicated to the so-called good understanding between the different religions of the country.