Mosques of the Casbah of Algiers

The Great Mosque is the oldest building in Algiers still doing the job it was built for. It was raised in the year 490 of the Hijra, 1097 in the common era, under Yusuf ibn Tashfin, in the Almoravid period. The date is not a guess. It comes from an inscription on the minbar, the pulpit.

The plan is wider than it is deep. Eleven naves run perpendicular to the qibla wall, divided by pillars carrying semi-circular arches of lime-washed masonry, each nave under its own double-sloping roof, with transverse poly-lobed arches tying the whole structure across. The rectangular courtyard is bordered on its two narrower sides by a riwaq, a gallery.

Two things in the building are not original, and both are informative. The mihrab is a reconstruction, because the original was destroyed in a bombardment in 1682. What stands now is flanked by two small spiral columns and topped with a pointed arch worked in relief stucco. And the minaret is a later addition, put up in 732 of the Hijra, 1332, at the northwest corner. The oldest mosque in the city spent its first two hundred and thirty five years without a tower.

The portico of columns and poly-lobed arches along the front is later still. It was built at the beginning of the colonial period because the street outside had been realigned, and the mosque needed a new face to meet it.

The New Mosque was built in 1070 of the Hijra, 1660, for Dey Mustafa Pasha, on the site of the Abu Inan madrasa. The quarter around it also held a smaller mosque used by the fishermen, and the Gate of the Sea. It follows Hanafite practice, which matters: Algiers under the Ottomans had a Hanafi ruling class and a largely Maliki population, and the two schools got their own principal mosques.

Structurally it is the most ambitious building in the Casbah. An ovoid central dome, whose inner surface reaches twenty four metres at the summit, rests on four pillars by way of a drum and four pendentives. Four octagonal cupolas sit in the corner spaces, separated from the centre by barrel vaults. The vault opposite the qibla wall runs over three bays and is flanked by two aisles.

Draw that plan and it comes out as a Latin cross. This is the single most repeated story about any building in Algiers: that a Christian architect, a captive, signed the mosque with the symbol of his own faith and was executed for it. It is a myth. The cross shape is what you get when you put a central dome on four piers and extend one arm of the vaulting, and the story grew up around the geometry afterwards. It is worth knowing precisely because you will be told it, and because the truth about the building is more interesting than the legend: someone in 1660 Algiers was confident enough to attempt a twenty four metre dome.

Ketchaoua was built in 1612, and enlarged under Pasha Hassan. The record gives both 1792 and 1794 for that enlargement, and this page is not going to pretend to know which. The enlargement is what turned it into the principal mosque of the lower Casbah.

The name is local and unofficial. It is attributed to the Turkish word for goat, after a livestock market that used to be held nearby. The site is older than the mosque: Roman structures underneath it have been confirmed, and historians hold that the mosque replaced an eleventh-century church. Four layers of use, then, on one plot.

In 1832, two years after the fall of the city, the French took it for Christian worship, and in 1845 it was consecrated as the cathedral of Saint Philippe. It served as a church for about a hundred and thirty years. At independence in 1962 the first Friday prayer in over a century was held in it again.

Its most recent chapter is a restoration funded by the Turkish state under a protocol signed in September 2013. The building reopened on 9 April 2018 after four years of work. It is the clearest success in the whole conservation story of the Casbah, and it happened because a foreign government paid for it.

The numbers are stark and they are worth stating in full. A quarter that once held a hundred and thirty mosques and eighteen zaouias now has ten mosques and two zaouias. Of about a hundred hammams, six survive.

Some of that is the demolition of the lower city after 1830, which took whole streets at a time. Some of it is the general collapse of the fabric: the same survey that counted the mosques recorded around twelve hundred traditional buildings in 1962 and about four hundred surviving dwellings by 1992.

But there is a specifically religious mechanism in it too. These buildings were not funded by congregations. They were funded by habus, endowments of property whose income was permanently assigned to the upkeep of a mosque, a fountain or a school. An endowed building has a maintenance income for as long as the endowment holds. Break the link between the endowment and the building and you have a structure with a repair bill and nothing to pay it with. That is the quiet reason a mosque can stand for eight hundred years and then fail in eighty.

There are mosques and mausoleums in the Casbah that deserve proper treatment and are not here yet, because I have not found sources for them that meet the standard the rest of this site is held to. Sidi Abderrahmane, the mausoleum of the patron saint of Algiers, is the main omission. The Safir mosque, the smaller neighbourhood mosques, and the madrasas are others.

They will be added when there is something reliable to say, and not before. In the meantime, if you have documentation on any of them, or you can correct anything above, please write to admin@casbah-alger.com.