It is called the Sixty Dome Mosque, but sources count eighty-one domes.
This is the Shait Gumbad Mosque in Bagerhat, in southwest Bangladesh. It was built in the fifteenth century by Khan Jahan Ali, a Turkic officer who governed the region for the Sultan of Bengal and died in 1459.
His city, then called Khalifatabad, was full of mosques, and this is one of the largest.
Thick brick walls carry the roof, and sixty slender stone pillars stand inside. Seven roofs over the central aisle are shaped like Bengali huts. The rest are low domes, with one more small dome on each of four round corner towers.
Eleven arched doorways open on the east side.
Nobody is certain where the name comes from. One explanation is that it once meant Sixty Pillars, and that the word for pillar slowly turned into the word for dome.
After Khan Jahan Ali died, his city was abandoned and overgrown. British surveyors recorded it in 1895, and restoration began in the early twentieth century.
In the middle of the 15th century, a Muslim colony was founded in the mangrove forest of the Sundarbans, near the coast in the Bagerhat District by a saint-General, named Khan Jahan Ali. He preached in an affluent city during the reign of Sultan Nasiruddin Mahmud Shah, then known as 'Khalifatabad'. Khan Jahan adorned this city with more than a dozen mosques, the ruins of which are focused around the most imposing and largest multi-domed mosques in Bangladesh, known as the Shait-Gumbuz Masjid 49 by 33 metres (160 by 108 ft). The construction of the mosque began in 1442 and was completed in 1459. The mosque was used for prayers as well as served as a madrasha and assembly hall.
Architecture and design
Architecture
The Sixty Dome Mosque features unusually thick, tapered brick walls in the Tughlaq style and a hut-shaped roofline that anticipates later styles. Its oblong plan measures 45.26 metres (148 ft 6 in) by 30.89 metres (101 ft 4 in) externally, and 37.57 metres (123 ft 3 in) by 23.22 metres (76 ft 2 in) internally. There are 77 low domes arranged in seven rows of eleven, with an additional dome on each corner, bringing the total to 81 domes. There are four towers, two of four towers were used for the call to prayer (azaan). The interior is divided into many aisles and bays by slender columns, which culminate in numerous arches that support the roof.
The mosque has 77 squat domes with seven four-sided pitched Bengali domes in the middle row. The vast prayer hall, although provided with 11 arched doorways on east and seven each on north and south for ventilation and light, presents a dark and somber appearance inside. It is divided into seven longitudinal aisles and 11 deep bays by a forest of 60 slender stone columns, from which springs rows of endless arches, supporting the domes, each 1.8 metres (6 ft) thick, slightly tapering walls and hollow and round, almost detached corner towers, resembling the bastions of fortress, each capped by small rounded cupolas, recall the Tughlaq architecture of Delhi. The western wall features eleven mihrabs on the interior where ten are blind and the central one is projected on the exterior. The mosque represents wonderful archeological beauty which was the signature in the 15th century.
Sixty domes or sixty columns
The mosque is locally known in Bengali as the 'Shat Gombuj Masjid', which means "Sixty Domed Mosque". However, there are 77 domes over the main hall and exactly 60 stone pillars. It is possible that the mosque was originally referred to as the "Sixty Pillared Mosque" where, in Arabic: شصت عمؤد, romanized: Amud, lit. 'column', later got corrupted in Bengali: গম্বুজ, romanized: Gombuj, lit. 'dome'.
The History, Architecture and later sections are adapted from the Wikipedia article “Sixty Dome Mosque”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full article. Text has been shortened.
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