Curious feature of the mosque
Seyit Jemaletdin Mosque. Among an insignificant number of the Timurids epoch monuments on the territory of Turkmenistan the mosque of Seyit Jemaletdin in Anau was the most brilliant one. According to the inscriptions on its facades and its interior it was built when Khorosan was ruled by Abu Kasim Baber Bahadurhan (1446/1457). Its construction was financed by his vezir Muhammed Khudaiot, who chose the site near the grave of his father Jemaletdin, Anau was born.
One curious feature of the mosque is the mosaic above the entrance way’s arch depicting two enormous 8-9m dragons facing each other. Their vivid yellow bodies contrast sharply with the deep blue mosaics background depicted on the facades of Central Asian buildings-especially religious buildings. They were sharp contradiction to the late-Islamic ban against depicting any living being object. There has as yet been no fully satisfactory explanation for this curious detail above the entrance to the Anau mosque. The mosque is located 12km. to the south-east of Ashgabat. The mosque was completely destroyed in the 1948 earthquake.
There were many folk legends connected with these dragons. One of them tells how a kind hearted queen lived long ago in the fortress and people often brought their requests to her. They rang the bell hanging by the gates when they heard the bell, her servants opened the gates listened to their requests and gave help to their petitioners. One day the bell rang out loudly at length. The servants ran to the gates and saw an enormous dragon ringing the bell with a beseeching look, without harming a soul. Somehow he was able to explain that his mate needed help. The servants followed the dragon into the mountains and freed his mate from a goat whose horns had gotten caught in her mouth. In gratitude both dragons brought many objects of great value to the fortress gates, and the queen ordered a magnificent mosque to be built from them. In this way the two dragons came to the mosque’s entrance way depicted above.
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