Juma Mosque of Derbent

The Juma Mosque, the Friday mosque of Derbent, stands in the old city between the walls that run down from the citadel of Naryn-Kala to the Caspian Sea, in Dagestan in southern Russia. An inscription over its entrance gives the date 115 of the Hijra, 733–734 CE, and it is generally held to have been founded by the Umayyad commander Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik, who took the city from the Khazars. It is regarded as one of the oldest mosques in Russia.

Derbent was then already an ancient fortress. Its walls had been built by the Sasanian kings of Iran in the sixth century to hold the narrow pass between the mountains and the sea, and its name is Persian, darband, “the barred gate”. The mosque stood at the centre of the city that grew up within those walls, and it was rebuilt several times; much of the present building, a long prayer hall under a dome with stone walls and arches, dates from a reconstruction in the fourteenth century after an earthquake.

In the courtyard grow huge old plane trees, said to be several centuries old, which shade worshippers and visitors in the summer heat. The mosque serves Derbent's Shia community, many of them Azerbaijanis, though Muslims of all communities come to see it. The old city of Derbent, with its citadel and walls, was inscribed by UNESCO in 2003.