Seyit Jemaletdin Mosque

Islamic sacred architecture has a famously strict relationship with figurative imagery, which is what makes the Seyit Jemaletdin Mosque so strange and so memorable. This Timurid mosque in Anau, about twelve kilometers east of Ashgabat in Ahal velayat, was once fronted by a monumental portal whose arch carried a pair of mosaic dragons - serpents in glazed ceramic, a motif almost unheard of in the mosques of the medieval Islamic world. The building dates to the mid-fifteenth century and survives today only as a ruin, but a ruin with a story disproportionate to its physical remains.

The mosque was built during the late Timurid period, when Khorasan was a stage for architectural ambition under the rulers of Tamerlane's dynasty. It was commissioned by Abulkasim Babur, a Timurid prince who governed the region, and the building formed a complex around the tomb of Seyit Jemaletdin - a local religious figure whose memory the site still carries in its name. What elevates it beyond a regional monument is the dragon imagery on the portal, which has no real parallel in contemporary Central Asian mosque decoration. Scholars have variously traced the motif to Chinese influence moving west along the Silk Road, to older Iranian mythology, or to a local Turkmen tradition that the Timurid craftsmen simply refused to abandon.

What you see today is a ruin in the literal sense. In October 1948 the Ashgabat earthquake flattened most of the structure, and what had been one of the most unusual mosques in Central Asia became an archaeological problem. Surviving fragments of the portal and its mosaic work remain protected in place, and the outline of the original walls is still legible on the ground. A visit takes in the tomb area, the remains of the iwan, and the adjoining courtyard, with the nearby Anau Tepe - an ancient settlement mound that predates the mosque by several thousand years - forming the other half of the archaeological site.

Something unexpected has happened to the place in the decades since the earthquake. Local visitors come here on an informal pilgrimage, tying strips of cloth near the ruins and asking the old saint for blessings - a living folk practice grafted onto a fifteenth-century Timurid monument grafted onto a prehistoric mound. The layers of belief stacked on this single patch of ground would take a patient anthropologist a career to untangle.

You come expecting a mosque and find something stranger - a site that refuses to settle into any single story, where dragons once watched over the entrance and the past keeps arriving in more layers than any earthquake could shake loose.