Nabi Yahya Mosque
Mosque in Sebastia, Nablus, West Bank
The Nabi Yahya Mosque (Arabic: جَامِع ٱلنَّبِي يَحْيَىٰ, romanized: Jāmiʿ An-Nabī Yaḥyā, lit. 'Mosque of the Prophet John') is a mosque containing the traditional tomb of Yahya (John the Baptist) in Sebastia, Nablus. The mosque also reputedly contains the tombs of the prophets Elisha and Obadiah. This mosque was originally a church.
Nabi Yahya is the main mosque in the Palestinian village of Sebastia, located in the central square. It is constructed of large buttressed walls and within its courtyard a stairway in the small domed building leads down into a cave.
History
Byzantine church
The Nabi Yahya Mosque stands on the site identified since Byzantine times as the place where John the Baptist's body was buried by his followers. Matthew 14:12 records that "his disciples came and took away [John's] body and buried it". A church was erected on the spot of the tomb during the Byzantine era.
Crusader cathedral
The church erected above John the Baptist's tomb was superseded by a Crusader-built church in 1160. It was transformed into a mosque by Saladin in 1187, although some sources say it was converted by the Mamluks in 1261.
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This entry incorporates text from “Nabi Yahya Mosque” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.