The great Umayyad Mosque in Damascus is sublimely beautiful!
Like all the largest mosques in the world, most of it consists of a vast open-air courtyard, with a nice big roofed-over area along the side facing Mecca.
And that open-air courtyard is surely the most sublimely beautiful in the world!
Row upon row of serenely graceful columns, like a dream from out of an Arabic classical Athens!
The beautiful legendary mosaics, of the garden paradise, perhaps the finest mosaics anywhere in the world, even more beautiful than those of the Romans!
Looking at Wikipedia, wondering just how big this vast mosque is, I came upon the figure of '43,000 square feet'.
I figured, that's a pretty big mosque!
43,000 square feet- that's bigger than 200 by 200 feet square!
That's pretty darn big!
Curious to see how it compares with other great early mosques, I started looking around at dimensions of mosques.
And I come across these dimensions for the great Umayyad mosque of Damascus: '157 meters long and 97 meters wide'
Wow!
Then I do a few calculations in my head.
157 meters by 97 meters...
518 feet by 318 feet...
That's a lot bigger than 43,000 square feet!
That's well over 150,000 square feet!
I go back to that Wikipedia article.
43,000 square feet is the size of the MOSAICS of the Mosque!
43,000 square feet is not the size of the Mosque!
It is the size of the Mosaics of the Mosque!
The great Umayyad Mosque of Damascus contains some 43,000 square feet of MOSAICS!
I thought that that was pretty big for the size of the Mosque!
I sit there in awe!
And those are the most beautiful mosaics I have ever seen!
Of course, what I saw was but a tiny fraction of a highlight of the mosaics!
And the Umayyad mosque is probably the most sublimely beautiful building I have ever seen!
The most sublimely beautiful wonder of the world!
I stand in awe!
God loves you!
Sincerely,
David S. Annderson