Rhodes has been many things. A Hellenistic kingdom whose Colossus once welcomed ships at the harbor mouth. A Roman province. A Byzantine theme. The headquarters of the Knights Hospitaller, who lost it to Suleiman the Magnificent's siege in 1522 after a six-month defense. Ottoman territory then for nearly four centuries, during which mosques replaced or stood beside churches throughout the old town. Italian from 1912, when Italy seized the Dodecanese during the Italo-Turkish War and held the islands through World War II. Greek from 1947, when the postwar settlement transferred them to Athens. The Mustafa Pasha Mosque has stood through all of this since the 1760s, used continuously for prayer until the 1940s, when the Muslim population of Rhodes, which had been substantial under Ottoman rule, dwindled through emigration to Turkey and the disruptions of the war.

Inside, the central dome covers the mihrab, the prayer niche oriented toward Mecca, and rests on a square plan. To either side, the rectangular vaults running east to west fill the corners that a single dome would have left awkward; this solution to the geometry of square room into round dome is conventional in Ottoman architecture, but the use of true rectangular vaults rather than pendentives or smaller domes is rare. Rhodes has many Ottoman mosques. None of the others do this. Two smaller, shallow domes nest between the vaults. The vault roofs are sheathed in lead strips. The mihrab itself is shallow, less than a quarter circle deep, and crowned by an arch shaped like a crescent moon. Two cylindrical columns frame it, each set on a rectangular base and topped with Corinthian capitals borrowed in spirit from the older classical tradition the eastern Aegean has always carried in its bones.

The minbar, the stepped pulpit from which the imam delivered Friday sermons, is among the largest surviving marble minbars on the island. Pieces of grey marble assembled with care. An ornamental top decorated with Arabic calligraphy. Beneath the calligraphy runs an inscription in stone of the Shahada, the Islamic declaration of faith: there is no god but God, and Muhammad is His messenger. The minbar has stood here for two and a half centuries. It has heard sermons in Ottoman Turkish, watched the call to prayer fall silent in the 1940s, and now sits patient through the wedding ceremonies that take place in the building several times a year. Since 1977, the local Muslim community of Rhodes, descendants of Ottoman families who chose to remain when the island became Greek, has used the former mosque as its wedding office.

Both the mosque and the octagonal stone fountain in its courtyard were registered as protected monuments by the Greek Ministry of Culture in 1948, the year after the Dodecanese officially joined Greece. The yellow facade and the lead roof were renovated in the mid-2010s. The minaret has not been rebuilt; whether it ever will is a question that touches on the politics of a small religious minority within a Greek Orthodox state, and on the practical question of who would pay for it. For now, the building is preserved without being fully restored, in active partial use, neither shut museum nor functioning mosque, but something more particular. A square in old Rhodes where a yellow building still belongs to the people whose ancestors built it, and still hosts the moments that mark new families joining the community.