Story
The story of Mirahori Mosque
This mosque stands at the very birth of Korçë as a town. Iljaz bej Mirahori, a Korçë-born official who rose to prominence under Sultan Bayezid II, built it in 1494, and he also founded the town. His plan was ambitious: under Ottoman law, a settlement needed both a Friday mosque and a marketplace before its residents could be registered as townspeople rather than peasants.
So he endowed five villages to pay for this and other buildings, and the mosque became the core of a complex with a soup kitchen, a bakery, storerooms, an inn, a bathhouse and a school. It is one of the oldest mosques in Albania. Notice the square prayer hall under a single dome, the entrance porch with three domes and the finely crafted cloisonné masonry.
The minaret was lost in the earthquake of 1961 and rebuilt after 2006. According to the writer Sami Frashëri, the mosque rose on the foundations of a monastery dedicated to Saint Paraskevi.
This story is compiled from Wikipedia and other open sources; dates and numbers are checked against the source. The text is shared under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence. Source ↗
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