Al Zahir Baybars Mosque
Religious rites continued to be held in this great mosque, and it was not suspended until the beginning of the sixteenth century AD, due to its wide area and the inability of the state to spend on it, and one of the results of that was that the condition of the mosque worsened and was destroyed, so the Ottomans turned it into a warehouse for war missions such as tents, saddles, and others, and during the era of the French campaign The mosque turned into a castle and barracks for the soldiers, and the mosque was known at that time as Sikovsky Castle, and in the era of Muhammad Ali, the mosque turned into a camp for a sect and a bakery for rations, and then it was used after that as a soap factory.
In the year 1812, the marble columns of the mosque, as well as some of its stones, were moved to build the portico of Al-Sharaqwa in Al-Azhar Mosque, based on the desire of Sheikh Al-Sharqawi, as mentioned in the book “Mosques of Egypt and Their Righteous Guardians”. The British occupation was a bakery and then an altar, and it was known and still is the “altar of the English,” although slaughter had been stopped since 1915 AD.
In 1918, the Committee for the Preservation of Arab Antiquities took over the mosque, so it repaired and restored some of its parts, especially the part surrounding the mihrab, and made it a chapel.
Despite what Baybars Mosque suffered from neglect and misuse, as mentioned above, it still attracts the admiration of the beholders with the beauty of its architecture and the grandeur of its buildings, which appear at first sight in its memorial entrance and its stucco inscriptions.
The mosque consists of a square with a side length of 100 meters and is surrounded by a wall of stone with a height of 11 meters. The wall is topped by balconies that are one and a half meters high, part of which still remains on the southern side of the mosque. The pillars of the mosque were strengthened from the outside with four towers, two square on both sides of the side The eastern and the other two are rectangular, and the towers are solid, except for the one that occupies the southwestern corner, which is hollow, as it is occupied by a staircase that leads to the roof of the mosque. Four small windows were opened in the last tower on the western side, two on the southern side, and two on the eastern side, as well as the strength of the outer wall with pillars.
The mosque contains three memorial entrances prominent on the outer wall, the main entrance of which is in the middle of the western side, while the northern and southern entrances are in the middle of the mosque’s courtyard only.
As the book “Mosques of Egypt and Their Righteous Guardians” says, the main entrance is considered a wonderful architectural masterpiece, as it is approximately 12 meters wide, and in the middle of the entrance is a knotted door with a knot width of 3.95 meters and decorated with lobed castanets, and it was centered on two marble columns that are now lost, and on both sides of this door are At the bottom there are two rectangular arcs topped by two rows of pendants, and inside them are two cavities surmounted by a lobed arch.
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