When was opened in 1913, the Saint Petersburg Mosque was the largest mosque in Europe outside Turkey, its minarets 49 meters in height and the dome is 39 meters high. The founding stone was laid in 1910 to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the reign of Abdul Ahat Khan in Bukhara. By that time, the Muslim community of the Russian then-capital exceeded 8,000 people. The architect Nikolai Vasilyev patterned the mosque after Gur-e Amir, the tomb of Tamerlane in Samarkand. Its construction was completed by 1921.
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