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Chechnya to get 5 new mosques designed by Turkish architects

GROZNY, January 16. /ITAR-TASS/. Turkish architects having extensive experience with the construction of religious facilities will design five mosques for the Chechen Republic, Musa Dadayev, the chief of the Secretariat of the Islamic Religious Council of Chechnya told Itar-Tass Thursday.

The plans suggest that three mosques will be built in the mountainous Shatoi district of the republic and another two mosques with a capacity for 5,000 believers each will be put up in the town of Argun and the village of Gekhi. A foundation capsule has already been placed into the ground at the site where the latter mosque will built.

The mosque in Gekhi, which is due to be opened in 2015, will have the name of Ilyas Kadyrov, a religious personality who was the great-grandfather of post-Soviet Chechnya’s first President, Ahmat Kadyrov.

The old mosque there was erected more than 150 years ago and it has a capacity for only 150 believers, while today the village has almost 13,000 residents.

“More than a hundred new mosques have been built in this republic over the past three years and now we have 819 mosques all in all,” Dadayev said.

The Heart of Chechnya mosque in the name of Akhmat-Hajji Kadyrov is the main treasure for the Chechen Islamic community believers. Its strictly classic Ottoman style suggests it has been modeled on the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

The Heart of Chechnya mosque has a capacity for 10,000 people and is the biggest mosque in Europe.

Checnya has a population of over 1.3 million and the majority of them are disciples of Sunni Islam.

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