Taza Pir Mosque

When philanthropist Nabat Khanum Ashurbeyova began financing a mosque over a 14th-century Sufi tomb in 1905, she couldn’t have predicted the nine-year ordeal ahead. Tsarist Russia, fearing Baku’s Muslim millionaires might fund the Ottoman Empire during the Balkan War, demanded bureaucratic approval for every ruble spent. After her death, her son finally completed it in 1914, Baku’s first white-stone mosque. Three years later, the October Revolution shuttered it. For the next quarter-century, its ornate prayer hall served as a cinema and barn.

Ashurbeyova never saw the finished building. She financed it entirely herself, hired the architect, and picked the site over the old Sufi grave, then died before the paperwork was even settled, let alone the construction. Her son inherited both the project and the Tsarist bureaucracy that came with it, and pushed it through anyway. The mosque got less than three years of quiet use before the Revolution turned it into a warehouse for whatever the state needed stored that decade, and later a place to watch films. It reopened as a mosque in 1943, in the middle of a war, for reasons the historical record does not bother explaining. It has been one ever since.