The mosque was built in 1910 under the patronage of Prince Felix Yusupov, whose family fortune was legendary even by the standards of the Russian aristocracy. To design it, he turned to Nikolay Krasnov, the same architect behind the imperial Livadia Palace on the coast. The mosque rose near Yusupov's mountain hunting lodge, in a valley he clearly loved. At the start of the twentieth century it had become fashionable among the Russian nobility, overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian, to fund the building of mosques in Crimea, and Yusupov, one of the empire's richest men, appears to have followed the trend. Whatever the motive, the result was a graceful house of worship gifted to a Crimean Tatar community by a prince who did not share their religion.

The building itself is a rectangular structure of the basilican type, its lines more austere than ornate. Its walls carry inscriptions in Arabic and are pierced by two tiers of lancet windows, their pointed arches drawing the mountain light into the prayer hall. Overhead runs a roof of clay tile, warm against the green of the surrounding hills, and beside the main building rises a slender minaret. There is a quiet harmony to the design, the work of an architect more accustomed to imperial palaces turning his hand to a village mosque. In the falcon valley of Kökköz, the mosque became both a spiritual center and a small architectural jewel.

The mosque's fortunes turned sharply in the twentieth century. In 1930 the Soviet authorities closed it and turned the sacred building into a warehouse. After the Second World War it was pressed into service as the village clubhouse and cinema, its prayer hall filled with the flicker of film reels rather than the murmur of worship. The regime even drew up plans to demolish its minaret, a common fate for religious architecture under Soviet rule, but for reasons lost to record, that demolition was never carried out. The tower survived, standing over a building stripped of its purpose, waiting through the long decades for the community it had been built to serve to return.

That community had been torn away. In 1944 the Crimean Tatars were deported en masse from their homeland, a forced exile that scattered families across distant regions and cost many their lives. Only decades later, after 1990, were the survivors and their descendants able to begin coming home. Among the first things they sought was the return of their mosque. Their petition to reclaim the building was finalized in 1997, restoring Yusupov's Mosque to the people it was made for. Since then it has been carefully renovated and kept in fine condition. Standing once more as a place of prayer, the mosque in the valley of the falcon is a testament to endurance, a building that outlasted the silencing, and a community that outlasted the exile.