Singra Mosque
Singra Mosque is situated about 183m to the south-east of the famous shatgumbad mosque, Bagerhat. It was in utter ruin in the early 1970's and it was brought under the protection of the department of archaeology, Bangladesh on 12 September 1975. Since then successive phases of repair works restored it to a fair state of preservation.
This square single-domed mosque, measuring 12.19m a side inclusive of the towers on the exterior angles, is entirely made of bricks. The walls are about 2.13m thick. The building has three two-centered pointed archways in the east, and one each on the north and south sides. The central doorway in the east is bigger than the flanking ones. Inside the qibla wall has an engrailed arched-mihrab, which has a rectangular projection outside and rises upto the cornices of the mosque.
The four circular corner towers, each being divided by raised bands at regular intervals, rise upto the roof-level. The cornices are gently curved in the Bengali fashion. The four blocked arches in the middle of the four walls in combination with Bengali pendentives and half-domed squinches on the upper angles support the only brick dome that covers the single square hall of the mosque.
The decoration of the building consists only of terracotta. The two cornice bands are decorated with lozenges, while the space in between them is ornamented with a frieze of tri-lobbed arched-niches. The moulded bands of the corner towers are marked with lozenge patterns.
The beautiful engrailed arch of the only mihrab spring from decorated brick pilasters and has prominent rosettes at its spandrels. The semi-circular mihrab niche depicts four horizontal sunken panels, each being demarcated by a raised band, and also a hanging motif. Above the arch is a moulded band, below which runs a sunken panel enriched with intersecting scrolls with flowers. All these are enclosed within a broad rectangular border filled with net patterns. Immediately above this border is another prominently projected band crowned with a frieze of blind petals.
The mihrab is flanked on either side by the engrailed arched-niche. The exterior surface of the dome, which has been made plain at the time of restoration work, was originally ornamented with circular rows of bricks like those on the dome of the nearby ranvijaypur mosque.
Both in construction and decoration the building is typical of Khan Jahan's style of architecture of the locality and may therefore be dated in the middle of the 15th century. [MA Bari]
