Padishah Mosque, Historical mosque in Sudak, Russia.

The Padishah Mosque, also called the Temple with an Arcade, is a rectangular domed building of 14.34 by 13.87 metres inside the Genoese Fortress in Sudak. Its square central hall, 8.8 metres on each side, is covered by a flattened dome on squinches, and the eastern side of the square is an arcade. A minaret stair survives, though the minaret itself was destroyed at the end of the 18th century.

Built in the 13th century, probably by the Seljuks as a mosque, the building was later converted into a Greek Orthodox church, then a Catholic church under the Genoese. After the Ottoman capture of Sudak in 1475 it became the Padishah Mosque. In 1771 Russian troops took the city, and after 1783 it served as a garrison church dedicated to the Apostle Matthew. Closed in 1817, it was restored in 1883 as an Armenian Catholic church, closed by the Soviets in 1924, and since 1926 has housed the Genoese Fortress museum.

The building is not an active mosque but the museum of the Genoese Fortress since 1926. Its names record successive faiths: Padishah-Jami under the Turks after 1475, Ayaz-Bayazid in Evliya Çelebi's 1642 account, and the Church of the Apostle Matthew for the Don Cossack garrison after 1783. Look for the Genoese coat of arms, a cross and a Crimean Tatar tamga on its walls.

The building now houses the Genoese Fortress museum, so no prayer etiquette applies; it stands in the eastern part of the fortress, reached by a wide road from the gate. Excavations in 1926, 1969–1975 and 1986 uncovered four distinct masonry layers. Look for the fresco fragment found in 1958 under plaster on a pilaster of the inner arcade.

The minaret was destroyed at the end of the 18th century when the Russian Empire took Crimea; its staircase survives inside, and a metal bell tower that replaced it has also vanished. A Latin inscription above the mihrab, flanked by the coats of arms of Caffa and the Catalani family, records a seven-year pause in construction after Genoa took Soldaia in 1365.