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Colombo Grand Mosque

Colombo, Italy

Colombo Grand Mosque

The Grand Mosque of Colombo is a mosque located in Colombo, Sri Lanka. The mosque has a history that goes back over 1200 years. The earliest European reference to the mosque appears in a description from November 1505 when the commander of a Portuguese expedition anchored in Colombo bay. In 1520 fol

lowing an attack on the Portuguese trading post, established earlier by Lopo de Brito, the Captain of Portuguese Ceylon, the King Bhuvanaikabahu of Kotte burnt the town (Colombo) along with two large mosques. The mosque was however rebuilt on the same site soon after. In the 1820s, the mosque was redesigned and rebuilt by Malay architect, Muhammad Balangkaya, the son of a Malay noble of the Royal House of Gowa (present-day Sulawesi, Indonesia), who was exiled to Ceylon in 1790 by the Dutch. The mosque was rebuilt as a two-storey structure, one of the first of its kind. In 1826 the British Governor of Ceylon, Edward Barnes, visited the mosque and commended the architect on the excellence of his work. In 1827 Sir Alexander Johnston discovered an Arabic inscribed tombstone dating to 948AD, which had been moved by the Dutch from the old Muslim cemetery next to the Grand Mosque, which indicates...

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