Recognition Architectural Stracture of Alishah Mosque in Tabriz, in Continuity the Tradition of Large - Scale Building in the Ilkhani Period

The politics of Ilkhanids dominating Iran in the 8th Century AH, resulted in an architectural form which its prominent feature was the massive size compared to their earlier buildings. In this era, the prevailing thought was that smaller sponsors should do smaller buildings, thus, we have an orderly sequence of three massive building complexes of Ghazania, Soltaniya and Alishah building. The resulted buildings could be identified as the appearance of the high ambitions of the Ilkhanid court in contrast to the existing circumstances of Iranian architecture.  Although the geographic and political aspects of the Soltaniya area made it relatively easy to study the spatial sturucture of the building, the increase in our understanding of the two other buildings will be due to the study of historical records and comparing to the remaining archaeological evidence. The following article focuses on the historical records regarding the Alishah building in Tabriz and tries to compare the information driven from these texts to the results drawn from the excavations, to understand the architectural form, spatial and practical structure of this building. This article shows that unlike the common belief, Alishah not only had the biggest brick arch in the world but it also had the greatest prayer halls beneath the dome in the Islamic world. Further, with the roofed shabestan, prayer hall, mihrab and minaret, and also based on the historical texts this building could be identified as a mosque.