BARA SONA MASJID , GAUR

 The construction of Baro Shona Masjid, measuring 50.4 m by 22.8 m, and 12 m. in height, was started by the Sultan of Bengal Alauddin Husain Shah and was completed in 1526 AD by his son Nasiruddin Nasrat Shah.
 The Indo-Arabic style of architecture and the ornamental stone carvings make Baroduari a special attraction for tourists
 The verandah in turn, opens onto a prayer chamber composed of three aisles with eleven bays each.
 Like the verandah, the prayer chambers, now in ruins was entirely covered with pendentives.
 In the northwestern corner of the mosque. Traces remain on a large Takht, the mosque is stoned faced, but unlike the earlier stoned faced Choto Sona mosque, the surface is not carved to imitate brickwork, the only ornamentation is a
string coursing running across the structure at half its height, majestic and somber, the ornamentation on the aro Shona Masjid stands in contrast to the ornamentally carved brick Jami mosque at Begha, built only three years earlier by the
same Sultan.

 The mosque is composed of eleven entrances, two buttresses, four corner towers and a spacious courtyard which is almost seventy meters in diameter.
 The building is faced in plain stone and the doors would originally have been framed by mosaics of glazed colored tiles in floral patterns. The roof was strewn with 44 hemispherical domes, of which 11 on the corridor still
remain. These domes were originally gilded, and, hence, gave the mosque its name. From the interior, these domes are arcaded, half in brick and half in stone.
 This very ancient mosque is also known as Qutub Shahi Mosque.
 The mosque was known as Sona Masjid due to its earlier gilded wall surface and crowns of the turrets.
 The eleven arched entrances of the east façade open into a long domed verandah formed by wide piers on the east and west sides.
 Great golden mosque which is the largest of all the monuments in gaur, having an open square in front of 200 feet diameter, with handsome arched gateways in the middle of three of its sides the sanctuary, a rectangular structure of brick faced
with stone is 168 feet long by 76 feet wide, its parapet 20 feet high forming a long shallow curve below which is spaced a series of eleven pointed arches between the octagonal turrets at the angles, its interior contains impressive aisles of
arches carried in front of the western wall within which is a mihrab opposite each bay.