Jameh Mosque of Qazvin

The Jameh Mosque of Qazvin, also called the Atiq, the “old” mosque, is one of the oldest Friday mosques in Iran. Tradition attributes its first building to the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, who is said to have ordered a mosque here in 807, when Qazvin was a frontier town facing the mountains of Daylam to the north. Over the following centuries each dynasty rebuilt and enlarged it, and today it covers a wide courtyard surrounded by four iwans.

Its finest part is the domed sanctuary on the qibla side, built under the Seljuks in the early twelfth century. The great brick dome rests on a square chamber, and its interior is decorated with a band of carved inscriptions and stucco ornament around a richly carved mihrab. It belongs to the same generation of domed chambers as the famous examples in Isfahan, and shows the confidence of Seljuk brick architecture.

Qazvin became the capital of the Safavid shahs in the mid-sixteenth century under Shah Tahmasp, and the mosque was given new iwans and tilework in that period and later. The tall iwans framed with turquoise tiles and the twin minarets on the south side date from these later works.

The mosque lies near the old bazaar of Qazvin, and a visit can easily be combined with the Safavid pavilion of Chehel Sotun and the Qajar caravanserai of Sa’d al-Saltaneh nearby. The prayer hall is still used every day, a working mosque that carries twelve centuries of the city’s history.