Juma Mosque (Khoja Ahrar Vali)

The Juma mosque is the oldest Friday mosque in Tashkent and the only courtyard-plan mosque in the city, a type common across Central Asia in the later Middle Ages.

Its story begins with a destruction. After the Arab conquest, Zoroastrian Chach was levelled; the Arabs, whose language had no ch, called the place al-Shash, later Shashkent, and only in the eleventh century did the name Tashkent appear. In 819 the emir Yahya ibn Asad laid the foundations of a new capital here, Madinat al-Shash. He chose the rise between the squares of Chorsu, Eski-Juva and Khadra, and on its highest point set the new city's first Friday mosque.

By the fifteenth century the building had decayed, and in 1432 a new one went up on its foundations at the order of Ubaydullah Khoja Ahrar Vali, a Sufi and a figure of weight in the Timurid age, born near Tashkent in 1404. Legend has it he raised the money by selling the thread ends left over from cutting cloth.

The ensemble that once surrounded the mosque is gone; only the Kukeldash madrasah and the dome of the Gulbazar mosque remain. In the eighteenth century the main cube and the vaulted galleries with their cells were thoroughly repaired by Yunus Khoja, hakim of Shaykhantaur. The earthquake of 1868 brought the building down almost completely and the mosque stood idle for some twenty years; most of the money for its rebuilding came from Alexander III, which is why it is also called the Tsar's Mosque.

In height it is the country's third Friday mosque after Bibi-Khanym in Samarkand and the Kalyan minaret in Bukhara. Before the high-rises went up, the fifteen-metre cube could be seen from almost anywhere in the city, and early photographers liked to shoot Tashkent from here. Since the restoration of 2003 the building carries three domes instead of one; the mosque is in use, and Chorsu next door brings a large congregation.