Sudak Castle Mosque, Crimea

On the Black Sea coast in south-eastern Crimea stands the Genoese-built castle of Sudak, and within it the Castle Mosque. ¹ There are two views of its founder: that it is the mosque built in the castle by Hüsameddin Çoban Bey of Kastamonu, who held Sudak briefly in 1222, or that it was built, together with Sarı Saltuk, by the deposed Seljuk sultan Izz al-Din Kaykawus II, exiled there under the Golden Horde and dead there in 1278. ¹

After Turkish rule ended, the Genoese gave it in 1373 to the Dominicans as a Catholic church. ¹ When the grand vizier Gedik Ahmed Pasha took the city in 1475 it became a mosque again, known as the Sultan or Bayezid mosque; Evliya Çelebi describes its stone dome and minaret and its marvellously carved mihrab, and notes that it needed repair. ¹ After Ottoman rule ended in 1778 the Russians demolished its minaret and made it the Orthodox church of St Matthew; after 1816 it served as a garrison, from 1883 to 1926 as an Armenian Catholic church, and then as a store for the castle's carved stones. ^{1 2} Extensively restored in 1959, 1962, 1969 and 1986, it is now a museum: a rectangle of 13.90 by 14.30 metres with stone walls 105 cm thick. ²