Prayer house or cultural centre? Restoring a mosque in post-socialist Armenia

ABSTRACT

Post-socialist urban dynamics in the Caucasus have been characterized by uneven processes of rebuilding and reclaiming of sacred spaces. Exploring re-emerging Shia Muslim lifestyles in post-conflict Armenia around Yerevan's Blue Mosque, I examine how a religious place is perceived and used in everyday life. Built at the end of the eighteenth century in a multi-religious environment, today the Blue Mosque is associated with the political body symbolizing the recent Iranian–Armenian friendship and with Iran's soft-power policy in the Caucasus. The ethnographic research reveals that the mosque complex is not an isolated sacred site emphasizing differences between Iranian migrants and Armenian locals, worshippers, and non-worshippers, but a spatial expression of the coming together of groups from different backgrounds and of the vernacular hybridity that existed in Yerevan in the past. In spite of the invisibility and the silence of the Blue Mosque's past from the point of view of government officials, the physical restoration of the mosque is triggering unembodied memories of people in conscious and unconscious reconstructions of the multi-religious past. The question, is to what extent does the Blue Mosque contribute to a visible rediversification of religious and ethnic life in Armenia?