Behram Bey's madrasah mosque

The Behram Bey's madrasah mosque in Tuzla

Ibrahim Krzović, 2000

The new Behram Bey's Madrasah Mosque in Tuzla is one of the recent examples of this theme in the opus of Zlatko Ugljen. This architecturally and programmatically unpretentious edifice, unexposed in the urban image of the city bears, perhaps, more value than the previous sacral edifices designed by Ugljen. The fact is that in this tiny space, where the meandering movement takes believers from the mundane to the sacral, all the elements of this architect’s expressive and design language have met. A purist synthesis has been achieved in both, the edifice as a whole and in its details, thanks to a very faceted treatment of the material, the construction as well as of the plastic design that always reveals the poetic and visual gift of an artist. The visual language, together with a highly cultivated treatment of material, renders harmony and unpretentiousness to everything and generates a state that erases the borderline between the physical nature and spirituality of the space. Furthermore, here again, and even more than earlier, the architect has succeeded in making his associates and contractors faithfully follow his idea. An absolutely new sense produced by this spiritually irradiated space shows a minimalism-led architecture and total design. Architecturally reduced, the Mosque and its space equally radiate the universality of the supernatural. This is why the Behram Bey's Madrasah takes the minds and hearts of believers beyond the prose of the soil; at the same time, as the installations of edifices created by Salim Obralić show, it perfectly corresponds to the forms of contemporary art.