The mosque's story is, first, a story of patience. From the mid-1990s onward, requests to build on the site met refusal after refusal, with permits granted and then rolled back and alternative locations proposed and rejected. The Crimean Tatars, the indigenous Muslim people of the peninsula, pressed on regardless, and by 2008 they had begun transporting roughly 100,000 limestone blocks to the ground in a show of determination. Construction at last began in September 2015. Even then the finish line kept receding, the completion date pushed from 2020 to 2021 and beyond, until the building was finally consecrated in December 2023. For a community that had waited a generation, the opening marked the arrival of a spiritual home long promised and long deferred, the seat of the spiritual administration of Crimea's Muslims.

The mosque is a deliberate blend of traditions. Its chief architect, Idris Yunusov, drew on the cross-dome plan of Byzantine architecture, echoing the great Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, with a central dome resting on a ring of semi-domes, and looked as well to the historic Juma-Jami mosque in Yevpatoria. Onto that Byzantine bone structure he layered the Ottoman Baroque, a marriage of Ottoman form and European Baroque ornament. The tulip, a signature flourish of Ottoman design, blooms throughout, appearing in the stained-glass windows and much of the painting. To root the building in Crimea rather than merely echo Istanbul, craftsmen from Kazan wove in authentic Crimean Tatar patterns drawn from the region's traditional clothing, so that the decoration would speak specifically of this land and its people.

For all its ornamental delicacy, the mosque is built to endure. Its frame is reinforced concrete, its exterior faced in marble, and its great dome, rising twenty-eight meters, is sheathed in twenty tons of lead. Four minarets, each carrying a distinct Ottoman influence, mark the corners of the complex and give the Simferopol skyline a new silhouette. The mosque does not stand alone: around it lie administrative and guest buildings, a flower garden, a park, galleries, and a fountain, the whole arranged as a serene precinct rather than a single structure. Among the outbuildings is a nineteenth-century guest house that blends Moroccan, classical, and South Coast Crimean Tatar styles. Together they form a landmark that took a generation of persistence to raise, now firmly part of the city's fabric.

The building is more than an architectural showpiece; it is the administrative and spiritual heart of Muslim life on the peninsula, the seat of the spiritual administration of Crimea's Muslims. Its very name binds it to the city's oldest identity. Akmesdzhyt is a form of Aqmescit, the White Mosque, the medieval name Simferopol carried for centuries, and by taking it the new mosque reaches back past the imperial city to the Crimean Tatar town that came before. That continuity was deliberate. The debates that surrounded the design, over how much should be Ottoman and how much authentically Crimean Tatar, were really debates about identity, about how a community long dispersed should picture itself in stone. What rose in the end was both grand and rooted, a mosque that borrows Istanbul's silhouette while insisting, in every tulip and woven pattern, that it belongs to Crimea.