Khoja Kalon mosque

Khoja Kalon Mosque in Bukhara is one of the historic Friday congregational mosques of the old city of Bukhara, the capital of the Bukhara Region of Uzbekistan and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1993. Bukhara was for over a thousand years one of the great religious and intellectual centres of the Islamic world — the city of the hadith collector Imam Bukhari, the philosopher and physician Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and the founders of the Naqshbandi Sufi order — and the densely-built old city contains a remarkable concentration of historic mosques, madrasas, mausoleums and caravanserais from the Samanid, Karakhanid, Timurid, Shaybanid and Manghit dynasties. Khoja Kalon Mosque takes its name from a respected Bukharan religious figure (a "Khoja" being a hereditary title for descendants of religious scholars in Central Asia) and serves the residents of the surrounding mahalla (neighbourhood) of the old city. The mosque continues the regional tradition of Central Asian Islamic architecture — characterised by glazed-tile decoration in geometric and calligraphic patterns, blue and turquoise majolica work, carved wooden columns supporting the prayer hall ceiling, and a small courtyard with a pool for ablutions — that connects Bukhara visually and architecturally to its sister cities of Samarkand, Khiva and Kashgar along the historic Silk Road.