The Great Mud Mosque — the largest earthen building on earth in a 2,000-year-old Saharan island city
Djenné is a UNESCO World Heritage Site city in Mali on an island in the Bani River, one of the oldest known towns in sub-Saharan Africa (inhabited since approximately 250 BCE), whose Great Mosque of Djenné (rebuilt 1907 on 13th-century foundations) is the largest mud-brick (adobe) structure in the world and the finest example of Sudano-Sahelian architecture. The annual re-plastering festival (crépissage) in April sees the entire community replaster the mosque together — one of the great communal rituals of West Africa.
Djenné-Jeno (literally 'Old Djenné') was settled by the 3rd century BCE and had become a major city of 10,000 people by 800 CE — one of the earliest urbanised settlements in sub-Saharan Africa, pre-dating the Islamic period. It flourished as a trans-Saharan trade junction linking the goldfields of Bambuk and Bure with North Africa and was a major centre of Islamic scholarship from the 13th century onward. The original Great Mosque was built around 1240; Ibn Battuta visited in 1352. The French colonial administration demolished the mosque in 1830 and the current building was reconstructed in 1…