“Jury President? Me?!”

The invitation came from Jasmin Sirčo, co-founder of the Sarajevo Days of Architecture, a festival that in 17 years transformed from student assembly to pillar of the discourse, in the intriguing ecosystem of ex-Yugoslavian republics.

Amorphous location of entries (Italy to Türkiye, East Germany to Greece – Sarajevo at the heart ça va sans dire), categories intentionally a bit ambiguous, several outstanding projects I did not know: as a fond researcher of awards I could not wait to see their renewed Fresh&Bold Architecture Award from the inside.

But as soon as I landed, Jasmin mentioned the name of another prize, one that always captivated my attention. “Did you know? There is a building that won it, here!” said, his eyes lighting up like a kid.

Tucked into Visoko – not far from Sarajevo, and even closer to the epicenter of Bosnia’s layered histories – stands a mosque that already carries its own medal. Šerefudin’s White Mosque won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture in the early eighties. I was hooked; after a million disappointments visiting award-winning buildings, I wanted to see if the peculiar procedure of Aga Khan actually managed to award excellence.

Because, notoriously, the prize is decided only after the Master Jury has surveyed in person each shortlisted project – 36 buildings in the 1981/83 edition, from Bosnia all the way to Indonesia. The Aga Khan Award was young back then (only a couple of triennial cycles old) yet its Master Jury of 9 already included names like James Stirling and Rifat Chadirji. Their dedication to experiencing architecture from the inside cemented the prize reputation, which still today carries a credibility incomparable to the recent jungle of pay-per-play souvenirs.

The original mosque dated back to the 15th century, Jasmin says, but a total redesign was completed in 1980 by Zlatko Ugljen, then in his forties, now in his nineties – and still very much alive.

Ugljen’s design nods to the archetypal Bosnian mosque: the square base, the porch, the perimetral wall, the small scale. But everything is slightly off, slightly re-composed: the white volume starts massively only to splinter to the sky. The porch looks familiar but sharper, pared down, with a fountain that reconciles minimalism with folklore. Inside, the mihrab and minbar are reduced to lines and surfaces, closer to sculpture than furniture.

What Ugljen built is not a nostalgic replica but a reset button. You feel how carefully he controlled the experience stepping down the travertine slope, washing at the fountain, entering through the porch. Every move is scripted, every threshold calibrated.

Inside, white walls. White ceilings. White light, pouring in through five slanted skylights that slice into the roof like divine spotlights. The five skylights aren’t just practical, they’re symbolic. The Five Pillars of Islam, they illuminate the hall at the exact time of prayer. They bend and break the dome so it no longer crowns the mosque, but hovers, fractured, like light itself.

If you’re looking for conventional ornament or golden domes, you’ll be disappointed. This is worship stripped to its bones – light, proportion, direction.

The only form of calligraphy is a reinterpretation on top of the minaret, where metallic pipes twist geometrically to evoke the concatenation of the written strokes. Tradition, distorted just enough to look futuristic.

From above I can spot many other mosques in the space of a stroll. The 5 prayers had to be reachable quickly for the workers of nearby leather factories. But compared to the rest, the complex shape of “the white flower” (as one of the jurors called it) showed me what the Master Jury was after: rewarding courage. A good reminder.

As we are walking down the minaret Jasmin tells me the reason the jurors swung their votes in favour of the small mosque: over time, like any good story repeated with pride, the anecdote came to acquire mythologic contours.

Legend goes that the Master Jury arrived in Visoko and immediately visited the recently finished mosque. They left their shoes at the entrance and went to explore its every corner. It took them time: the architectural quality was undebatable, the design choices unexpected, but such a courageous composition had some jurors wondering about the dialogue with its rather traditional context. One of them, particularly inquisitive, reached out to an old man who had gotten curious by so many foreign faces in his small Yugoslavian village.

“Hello Sir, if you don’t mind me asking, what do you think about the new mosque here?”

“This? I hate it” responded the old man, abrasively. “Me, I don’t like it. But my son will like it, and my grandson will be proud of it.”

Despite its truthfulness, I ponder, the anecdote reveals a lot regarding the professional credibility that haunts the proposals of young architects today. To me, this is the reason why the White Mosque matters today as much as it did in 1983. It proves that even sacred architecture can be modern without being alien. That you can be radical without cutting yourself off from roots. That innovation doesn’t have to scream – it can whisper in white.

And maybe that’s what architecting worship is about: not the building itself, but the pause it forces in us. A moment of white space in a noisy world.