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 The mosque village Kshkar
Arsk region
The mosque was built by the merchant Bayasit bin Usman al-Kshkari(d.l797)in 1776-1777. In 1865 his great-grandson Murtaza bin Mustafa extended the building and erected a minaret made of brick, which was ruined in the 1930-s. From the end of the 18th till the beginning of the 20th century such prominent theologians and pedagogues as Sagit bin Ibragim al-Barishi (d. 1813), Fayaz bin ad-Dubjazi (1779-1844), Ismagil bin Musa al-Maskaravi (d. 1887), Shagimardan Utyaganov (d. 1857), were imams there. The scientific and pedagogic activity of these religious men brought fame to the Kshkar madrasah, which was for almost 150 years considered one of the most prominent and authoritative Moslem educational institutions in Russia. The mosque is situated in the centre of the village. It belongs to the type of
a two-storeyed mosque with three praying-rooms and a minaret on its roof. The ground floor had storage and household premises. On the first floor there are the vestibule and three praying-rooms of different size. The rooms are connected with three arched apertures. The second and third praying-rooms are ceiled with high diminished vaults. The rectangular mikhrab begins with a deep arched niche. The three-tiered minaret under the hipped crown is being restored according to the reconstruction project, which was worked out in 1989 by the architect R. V. Bilyalov. The facades are decorated with pilasters, window casings and cornices that are characteristic of “Petersburg” baroque. The surface of the vaults separated from the walls by profiled cornices is decorated with moulding, like the decoration in the Mardjani mosque in Kazan. The mosque in Kshkar village with its traditional layout and arrangement and elements of baroque and Tatar decorative art is an outstanding monument of religious architecture of the Tatars. Though having rather plain arrangement of the facades, it is notable for free arrangement of apertures on the facades. That gives the mosque some likeness to other buildings of earlier periods and adds some romanticism to it.
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