As a public place of worship for Muslims, the mosque has a special importance - one reason why governments in the Middle East, North Africa and the Far East have chosen to depict mosques on their postage stamps. Another is that these places of worship are often historically valuable, architecturally striking and esthetically beautiful.


From Malaysia to Morocco, the typical mosque has the same basic form. Exteriors are often rectangular in outline with interiors consisting of a central, open court surrounded by a cloister or walkway covered by a roof atop rows of pillars. A dome often covers the mosque's central court. The wall facing the Ka'ba in Mecca, the holy city of Islam in Saudi Arabia, contains a prayer niche, or mihrab, towards which worshipers face when they pray. Rising above most mosques - vertical extensions of them - are one or more minarets from which muezzins call the faithful to prayer five times a day.


Most mosques have three features in common: fountains or faucets used by Muslims to wash before prayer, space for worshipers to pray and a pulpit, or minbar, from which a learned member of the Muslim community gives the Friday sermon. But there are variations on the basic design, and the numerous postage stamps issued by Muslim countries throughout the world show graphically how extensive these variations can be.


In Turkey, for example, mosques and minarets are frequent themes on postage stamps, particularly the Hagia Sophia and the Blue Mosque, two of the most famous buildings in the world.


The Hagia Sophia mosque is in Istanbul. Built as a Christian church by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian in the sixth century, it was converted into a mosque by the Ottoman Turks, who captured Constantinople from the Greeks in 1453. It is depicted on a 1955 Turkish 30 kurush stamp.


A 20 kurush value in the same set depicts another of Istanbul's famous structures, the Mosque of Sultan Ahmad, better known as the "Blue Mosque." The Ottoman Sultan Ahmad I built the Blue Mosque between 1609 and 1616, and it is the most conspicuous edifice in Istanbul that can be seen from the Sea of Marmora. These two stamps - the one showing Hagia Sophia and the other showing the Blue Mosque - are part of a series issued to publicize the Tenth International Congress of Byzantine Research, an event which took place in Istanbul in September, 1955.

Source: ARAMCO