A small green wooden mosque in a Polish village was founded by Muslim soldiers, and it still stands.
This is the Kruszyniany Mosque, in the Podlaskie region of Poland, near the border with Belarus.
Around 1683, King John the Third Sobieski gave land here to the Lipka Tatars, Muslim cavalrymen who had served the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.
A document from 1717 mentions a mosque in the village. The present wooden building replaced an earlier one. Its exact date is unknown, probably the eighteenth or early nineteenth century. A plaque records a renovation in 1846.
It is about ten by thirteen metres, covered in dark green boards, and it looks like the wooden churches nearby. Two small towers with crescent moons stand at the front.
The prayer niche points southeast, toward Mecca. Women pray in a smaller section behind a wooden partition and a white curtain.
The village also has a Muslim cemetery, and a Tatar centre and museum.
In 2012, Kruszyniany was named a Historic Monument of Poland.
The mosque is counted among the oldest wooden mosques in the country.
