The governor was Mustafa Agha Tzistarakis, and the mosque bears his name. To make lime for its walls he ordered an ancient marble column burned - the legend says a column from the Temple of Olympian Zeus, though historians think it more likely came from the nearer ruins of Hadrian's Library. Either way, it was an act of destruction that horrified the city, and not only the Greeks. The Ottoman authorities themselves considered it sacrilege, a desecration that might loosen vengeful spirits upon Athens. When an outbreak of plague swept through the city later that same year, killing residents Greek and Turkish alike, many took it as proof. Tzistarakis was dismissed in disgrace. The building he left behind has been known ever since, in local memory, as the cursed mosque.

Once it stopped being a place of prayer, the mosque became whatever Athens needed it to be. During the Greek War of Independence it served as a meeting hall for the town elders. After independence it hosted, of all things, a grand ball in honor of the young King Otto in March 1834 - and then, in turn, became a barracks, a prison, and a storehouse. In 1915 the architect Anastasios Orlandos partly rebuilt it, and from 1918 it housed a museum of Greek handwork, later renamed the National Museum of Decorative Arts. For a brief moment in 1966 it returned to its first purpose, refitted as a place of prayer during a visit by the deposed Saudi king Saud. Few buildings in Athens have worn so many costumes.

The mosque sits at the heart of Monastiraki, the chaotic, irresistible quarter where Athens piles its centuries on top of one another. It was once called the Mosque of the Lower Fountain, or the Mosque of the Lower Market, names that placed it by its neighbor the Ancient Agora. Today the square around it churns with flea-market crowds, street musicians, and the smell of grilled meat, with the Acropolis floating above the rooftops. Since 1973 the building has been an annex of the Museum of Greek Folk Art, and it still holds the V. Kyriazopoulos collection of ceramics - shelves of glazed pottery from across the Greek world. An earthquake damaged it in 1981; it reopened, repaired, in 1991. The dome that a curse supposedly built now shelters the everyday art of the people who told the curse.