CONTEMPORARY MOSQUES IN EUROPE:

International architectural contest for the design of Islamic Cultural and Religious Center in Ljubljana (MVKC) was assessed in public as the most significant architectural contest in 2011. As many as seventy-eight architects participated in it. This complex of 15,000 square meters is also one of the first comprehensive, environmentally-smart projects in Slovenia and has so far received several prestigious architectural prizes (Plečnikova prize, 2020 and Building of the Year 2021, ArchDaily).

Construction of contemporary Islamic religious-cultural centers is one of the increasingly present architectural topics in Western Europe. They are centers of different ethnic communities that, by their visual identity and basic principles of shaping, strive to harmonize recognizable elements of cultural-historical heritage of the countries they come from with the environment they live and work in now. This open question has been increasingly faced by Bosniak community in different European countries as well.

The first center of the kind was opened in Zagreb more than thirty years ago (1987). At the time, it was the most significant and the most modern multifunctional center with religious and social-cultural contents of great significance both for the Islamic Community and for the city of Zagreb and, at the same time, in geostrategic terms, a Bosniak Islamic center closest (dominantly, though not exclusively) to Western Europe. In the meantime, other cities such as Graz (2010), Rijeka (2012), Ljubljana (2020), as well as several recent examples which shift this boundary more toward the West, have constructed Islamic centers of their own. Contemporary Islamic cultural centers are also being built in Sisak and Osijek, a city which used to have dozens of waqf buildings (mosques, madrasas, caravanserais, bridges etc.).

Although building of such centers significantly contributes to the image of these cities, in line with the great European story about coexistence of cultures and religions in pluralist societies and equal democratic freedoms and civil rights of all its citizens or, as in the example of Ljubljana, it activates neglected urban zones, funding the construction of these projects, which amounts to tens millions of euros starting from the purchase of land, financing the project of contest to obtaining the building permit and other necessary documentation, is not supported by local authorities or the state and is fully born by developers, i.e. Islamic communities and their members.

Fundamental elements of the appearance of a mosque are not defined either by the Qur'anic text or by Hadith. In a way, the serdžada (prayer rug) directed toward Mecca could be understood as the smallest architectural space which is built and shaped by a believer in the act of praying. It unifies and implies all the necessary and fundamental elements of a praying site: cleanliness, direction, idea of communication and communion.

When one asks the question as to whether building mosques in the West is today such a delicate issue, we move to a new, political dimension of the issue, which is in turn related to the issue of representation, i.e. “visibility” of Muslims in the public space of Europe. Some forms, like the dome and the minaret, as recognizable formative elements in the architecture of mosques, gain the power of fast symbolic markers.

One of the values of Islamic culture has always been its openness to cultures which it found, and the ability of creative assimilation of elements – from China to the world of Antiquity and Byzantium. Islam is a journey of life which is open. A beautiful example of such a creative synthesis of the local and the universal is the design of a mosque in Bavarian town of Penzberg (2005), near Munich, a work by an architect of Bosnian and Herzegovinian origin Alen Jašarević. In his design, he united diverse elements – from decoration inspired by ornamental motifs of Spanish, Southern-Italian and Indian architecture to elements which refer to the local miners’ tradition of this Bavarian, sub-alpine town, shaping the minaret made of bored steel, the ore for which had been extracted in this region for decades.

In terms of urban development, building the Islamic Religious and Cultural Center in Ljubljana has revived a large city zone of Bežigrad, near the railway-industrial zone and the central city areas. Authors of the design, Matija Bevk and Vasa Perović, elevated the entire complex by about 70 cm compared to the surrounding level and thus created a distinctive “urban island”. The well-conceived “micro-geography” of the contents such as apartments, a school a restaurant which are positioned along the edges of the lot created, as authors of the design wrote in the explanation, an inner square where the centrally located mosque represents the heart and the spiritual center of the whole complex, as an independent and isolated cube oriented toward Mecca. All programs of this large center have been planned as independent units, within a large green zone, though at the same time they are inter-related. What has been assessed as a particular value of the design is the fact that it does not repeat historical models but rather attempts to open the question as to what makes up the essence of Islamic sacral space. The dome, as the dominant symbolic and visual accent, is planted in a glass, structurally shaped cube like a hanging textile structure in blue color, which unobtrusively evokes memories of the nomad tradition of the first centuries of Islam, as well as of the serdžada (prayer rug), which the believer always carries with him and spreads in the direction of Kaaba.

According to one of the authors of the design, architect Matija Bevk: “We wanted to create a design which is embedded in tradition though modern at the same time, i.e. a distinctive hybrid of traditional Islamic values and the modern world, an integration of the Islamic religious community and Slovenian society.  We therefore conceived it as a complex with a clear, un-closed identity; if you visit the center, you do not have to visit, for instance, the mosque. It opens toward the city even at the first glance. Wherever you stand in the square in front of the mosque, at least one view of the city opens before your eyes.”