Fatih Sultan Mehmet Mosque


The Fatih Sultan Mehmet Mosque, also known as the Fatih Mosque, a 13th-century building. It is within the Rozafa Castle near Shkodër, Albania. It was built by the Ottoman Empire, when they were ruling Albania.

History

According to archaeological studies conducted in the 1980s, the building was a church, built around year 1300, and was named after St. Steven. The studies base the construction year on typical construction techniques of the era. The transformation into a mosque occurred in 1479 and the object was renamed after Mehmed the Conqueror, or Fatih Sultan Mehmet.
The ruins of this church-mosque feature a Dikka, a Mihrab, and the remains of a large Minaret. The Fatih Sultan Mehmet mosque is one of the few buildings from the Middle Ages in Shkodër and is the only mosque that partially survived in Shkodra during the dictatorship of Enver Hoxha, who destroyed all 36 mosques in Shkodër. A planned attempt to convert the mosque into its origin, a church with partial U.S. sponsorship was not liked by the Muslim community of Shkodër, and the ambassador of the United States, Ms. Marcy Ries, promised to re-assess the funding of the project.