K.H. Ahmad Bone appointed K.H. Muchtar Lutfi to chair the construction committee, and architect Muhammad Soebardjo won the design competition that would shape the building's first incarnation. Construction began on May 25, 1949, just four years after Indonesia proclaimed independence from the Dutch. The total cost came to 1.2 million rupiah -- a modest sum that reflected both the young nation's limited resources and the community's determination to build something meaningful. The mosque rose on Bulusaraung Street, drawing roughly 80 percent of its building materials from local sources. It was not merely a place of worship. In a city still shaking off centuries of colonial rule, the mosque became a declaration: Makassar would define itself on its own terms.

The Grand Mosque quickly became a landmark that drew national attention. In 1955, it hosted the first-ever Musabaqah Tilawatil Quran festival -- a Quran recitation competition that would grow into one of Indonesia's most cherished cultural events. Two years later, Sukarno, the nation's founding president, stopped in Makassar and performed Friday prayers at the mosque. A decade after that, in 1967, President Soeharto followed suit. These were not merely ceremonial visits. In a sprawling archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, a president choosing your mosque for Friday prayers signaled that your city mattered, that your community had weight in the national story. The mosque became, as Makassarese often describe it, a source of civic pride -- a building that represented not just faith but the city's stature.

By the late 1990s, the original structure -- functional but modest -- no longer matched the ambitions of a city that had grown into one of eastern Indonesia's most important urban centers. Vice President Jusuf Kalla, a native of Makassar, championed a massive renovation that would reinvent the mosque from the ground up. Not everyone embraced the idea. Concerns arose that a nearby plaza development might turn the sacred site into a commercial venture, swallowing the mosque's identity in a wave of retail construction. Those fears eased as the renovation took shape. Governor Zainal Basri Palaguna broke ground on October 9, 1999, and the overhaul stretched until 2005 -- six years of construction that transformed the building's character entirely.

The renovated mosque is a different building from the one Soebardjo designed in 1949. Two minarets now rise 66.66 meters above Bulusaraung Street, their height a deliberate echo of Islamic numerology. The design shifted from its original Indonesian vernacular toward a style that blends Middle Eastern mosque architecture with Mediterranean touches -- arches, domes, and a scale that announces the building from a considerable distance. Inside, the two-story prayer hall accommodates up to 10,000 worshipers, making it one of the largest mosques in Southeast Asia. Adjacent facilities include a library and the South Sulawesi chapter office of the Indonesian Ulema Council. Among the mosque's most distinctive features is a giant handwritten Quran, measuring 1 by 1.5 meters and weighing 584 kilograms, crafted by KH Ahmad Faqih from Wonosobo in Central Java.

Makassar is a port city that has reinvented itself repeatedly -- from the seat of the Gowa Sultanate to a Dutch colonial outpost, from a Japanese-occupied staging ground to the capital of modern South Sulawesi. Through each transformation, the Grand Mosque has served as a fixed point, an institution older than the Indonesian republic's own settled governance. The soccer field is long gone, but the impulse that built over it endures. Every Friday, the call to prayer from those 66-meter minarets carries across the rooftops of a city of nearly two million, reaching toward the Makassar Strait. The mosque remains what K.H. Ahmad Bone envisioned when he looked at an empty pitch in 1947: not just a building, but a statement about what a community values enough to build first.