Before the Great Mosque existed, Palembang's royal mosque stood inside the kraton complex of Kuto Gawang, built by Sultan Ki Gede Ing Suro. In 1659, Admiral Johan van der Laen of the Dutch East India Company destroyed it. The sultanate waited nearly eighty years before starting over. Construction began in 1738 beside the Kraton Tengkuruk, also known as Kuto Kecik, but tensions with the Dutch slowed the work to a crawl. The mosque was not completed until 1748 -- a decade of construction punctuated by the constant threat of colonial violence. When it finally opened, the Sultan Mosque was believed to be the largest in Indonesia, perhaps in all of Southeast Asia, with room for 1,200 worshippers beneath a multi-tiered roof supported by four main posts and topped with a mustaka ornament.

The first minaret's story mirrors the mosque's own troubled timeline. Construction began in 1748, the same year the mosque was finished, but another Dutch conflict intervened. The minaret was not completed until 1812 -- sixty-four years of intermittent work to raise a 20-meter white brick tower with a hexagonal floor plan and a clay tile roof that observers compared to a Chinese pagoda. That pagoda-like crown did not survive the next round of fighting. After the abolition of the Palembang Sultanate in 1823, the Dutch renovated the mosque as a gesture of conciliation, replacing the minaret's destroyed clay tile roof with shingles in 1825. Conciliation, in this case, meant reshaping the building to Dutch taste. By 1848, the colonial government had replaced the mosque's traditional entrance with neoclassical porticoes and Doric-styled columns, grafting European grandeur onto a structure rooted in Javanese and Malay building traditions.

Each generation enlarged the building and changed its face. An 1879 expansion added a concrete-columned porch. In 1897, surrounding land was acquired to create a proper mosque complex, and the building received its current name: Masjid Agung, the Great Mosque. Restorations in 1916 and 1930 addressed the minaret and raised the pillar columns by four meters. Then came the most dramatic transformation. Between 1966 and 1969, a second floor was added, expanding the mosque's footprint to 5,520 square meters and its capacity to 7,750 people. On January 22, 1970, a new 45-meter Ottoman-styled minaret with twelve sides was erected, funded by Pertamina, the state oil company. A Middle Eastern dome crowned the structure. The original Javanese roof survived beneath these additions, but the mosque's profile had changed beyond recognition -- a building designed by sultans now looked like it could have been transplanted from Istanbul.

The final major renovation began in 2000, with the goal of restoring the mosque's original architectural language. The work was completed on June 16, 2003, and President Megawati Sukarnoputri inaugurated the result: a building that could hold 9,000 people inside and 15,000 when the courtyard was in use, but that once again showed its Javanese roots in its green three-tiered roof. The mosque now stands with both minarets intact -- the 18th-century hexagonal tower with its Chinese-influenced silhouette and the 1970 Ottoman column -- an architectural odd couple that somehow works. But the Great Mosque's most revealing chapter may be the conflict over the Lawang Kidul Mosque. In 1893, a timber merchant named Masagus H. Abdulhamid built a rival mosque near the harbor, and it quickly became the preferred departure point for hajj pilgrims bound for Mecca. The religious elite at the Sultan Mosque, threatened by the upstart, persuaded the Dutch colonial advisor Snouck Hurgronje to order Lawang Kidul closed. It remained shuttered until Hurgronje's retirement in 1906 -- by which point the Great Mosque had outgrown its own walls, and the objection had become moot.

From above, the Great Mosque is identifiable by its distinctive green tiered roof, a form now understood as a descendant of the traditional limas pyramidal roof rather than a purely Chinese import. The two minarets break the roofline at different heights and in different styles -- one squat and hexagonal, the other tall and twelve-sided -- marking the centuries between them as clearly as tree rings. During Ramadan, the grounds in front of the mosque transform into a bustling market, the kind of temporary bazaar that has gathered around mosques across the Islamic world for centuries. Vendors and worshippers crowd the same space where, in old photographs, colonial-era crowds gathered for speeches by the Dutch resident. The mosque has outlasted every administration that tried to reshape it. Its green roof, patched and rebuilt and restored, still catches the equatorial light above the Musi River -- the most enduring landmark in a city that has been trading, fighting, and praying on these banks for a very long time.