Sultan Selim Mosque (Knežina)

Sultan Selim II Mosque in Knežina or Selimiye Mosque, sometimes referred to as Emperor's Mosque (Sultan Selima džamija; Selimija džamija; Careva džamija) is the 16th century mosque located in the settlement of Knežina, Sokolac municipality, Bosnia and Herzegovina.

At the beginning of the Bosnian War, in the summer of 1992, the mosque was demolished with explosives by local Serbian authorities and militia. It was completely rebuilt from the same material and officially opened on September 4, 2011.

The mosque site and material remain were declared National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina by KONS on May 4, 2004.

Historija

The Selimiye Mosque was built during the reign of Selim II (1566–1574) or during the reign of Selim I (1512–1520).

Andrej Andrejević, who studying monumental Islamic art of the 16th century in the former Yugoslavia, established that the type of single-space domed mosque, created in the Beylikdüz period (12th–14th centuries), given the number of buildings of this type built, can be considered a standard and common solution for single-space domed mosques in Yugoslavia. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Andrejević lists 8 mosques of this type, including the mosque of Sultan Selim II in Knežina near Sokolac.

All of these mosques bear the characteristics of Ottoman architecture, which is the youngest offshoot of Islamic architecture, but they are spatially significantly smaller than the monumental mosques in Istanbul, Edirne and other centers of the Ottoman Empire. The fact that these buildings are smaller in size than those in Istanbul does not diminish their value but rather is a sign of the material possibilities of the environment in which they were built. By the time the Ottomans occupied Bosnia, they already had an established style of mosques that they built in the newly conquered regions.