AT A GLANCE
Why go?
On Titova street in the small Bosnian town of Gradačac stands the Reuf-Begova Mosque (Reuf-begova džamija), also called the Hadži Reuf-beg or Nova “new” mosque. It is a working neighbourhood place of worship whose real treasure lies beside it: a walled harem of 19th-century Ottoman gravestones, officially declared a National Monument of Bosnia and Herzegovina. For the curious traveller it offers a quiet, authentic glimpse of Ottoman-era civic life rather than a polished tourist site.↗↗↗
The mosque was raised around 1878–1893 on the foundations of an earlier mesdžid founded by Begefendija Gradaščević c. 1835, funded largely by hadži Reuf-beg Gradaščević, a scion of the beg family that once ruled Gradačac. When Reuf-beg died in 1893 he was buried in the very courtyard of the mosque that bears his name.↗↗
A mosque built by the family behind the fortress
Gradačac owes much of its old character to the Gradaščević begovska dynasty, the local landowning clan that produced Husein-kapetan Gradaščević, the “Dragon of Bosnia” who led a failed uprising against the Ottoman sultan. The Reuf-Begova Mosque belongs to that same family story. Hadži Reuf-beg Gradaščević financed the house of prayer on the site of a small earlier mosque, the Begefendića mesdžid put up around 1835, where worshippers had once said the evening and night prayers while the grander daytime and holiday services were held at the fortress mosque. The new mosque was completed in the period 1878–1893, taking its benefactor's name.