Tarikhaneh Mosque is one of the most valuable Islamic buildings in the country and a monument of the golden age of Damghan as a trade and communication highway between East and West and especially Rey Road to Khorasan and the oldest mosque in Iran.
History is a combination of the Turkish word “tari” meaning God and “house” in Persian and means “god of the house”. It is called “Nari Khaneh” meaning fire house and then it became known as history.
Many scholars have discussed the time of construction of the original building of this mosque. Mohammad Karim Pirnia “considers the date of its construction to be around 150 AH.
In the book “History of Iranian Industries” it is stated that the oldest mosque that has survived well is the history of Damghan; Although there is no inscription that determines its date, but from the style of the building, it can be considered to belong to before 200 AH.
The French archaeologist “Andre Godard” while presenting detailed treatises considers the architectural style of the Tarikhaneh Mosque as the style of the Sassanid period and notes that in the construction of the Tarikhaneh Mosque all forms of Iranian architecture are pure and even in using materials, the same materials used in Sassanid architecture are bricks. , Is made of clay, plaster and wood, so the date of construction of this building in the middle of the second century AH dates back to the time of the first Abbasid caliph “Safah” in 132 AH and the reign of Harun al-Rashid in 193-170 AH.
He adds: “We can provide an example of a building that predates the Seljuk period, that is, according to the period in which the main example of Iranian mosques was formed, two of them are the Damghan Tarikhaneh Mosque and the Nain Mosque.”
History is also called the Chehelstone Mosque, and this title often does not represent in Iran that it necessarily has a Chehelstone, but it means several columns.
The plan of this building is the plan of the mosques of the beginning of Islam, which was free of any foreign elements. They made a tower out of bricks; This new minaret was not built in place of the old minaret, but next to it.
This building consists of a courtyard in the form of an approximate square that has arches on all four sides and one of the arches, which is deeper than the others, has the place of the mosque and therefore faces the qibla. Mosques are the beginning of Islam.
In the historical building, that is, in the architectural forms in which they are used and in the shape of the building, there is nothing that is not pure Iranian. It can even be said that in this building there is no shape and no part of the building that does not belong to Sassanid architecture.
Historically, it is so alien to Iran in terms of maps and so much in terms of construction that one of the famous tourists named “Eastwick” who paid attention to such places, imagined that its ruins are one of the temples or one of the palaces. The period of the city of Hakatam is Piles. According to the description, the date should be considered as close as possible to the Sassanid period, but it should be stopped at the time when the main map of the mosque was drawn.
This mosque has a courtyard in the middle with dimensions of 72.26 meters long and 72.25 meters wide, which is surrounded by arched spaces. The entrance of this mosque is from the longitudinal side of the east. And strong pillars have been made.
Today, the rocking arches of the mosque have collapsed, but in their original form they were comparable to the rocking arches of the Fahraj Grand Mosque.
The columns of this circular mosque are 160 cm in diameter and 90.4 to 97.4 m in circumference, and its height from the ground to the place on which the arch rests is 284 cm and it is 6 meters to the roof. Each side of the square bricks of these columns is 34 and their thickness is 5.7 cm, which are stacked alternately, following the Parthian and Sassanid period bricklaying, horizontally and vertically.
In the northern direction of the mosque, there is a 26-meter-high brick minaret, which is a distance from the mosque, and its base is 13 meters without a platform from the ground and its final diameter is 6.8 meters above it. The effect of the earthquake is bad, but we see that its head is regular and if it was due to the earthquake, it was irregular.
At a height of ten meters, there is an inscription in Kufic script with bricks and its founder is Abu Harb Bakhtiar Mamdouh Manouchehri. Therefore, this minaret was built between 420 and 430 AH.
