Hundreds of blue stars worked in broken china across the domes and façade of a small Mughal-style mosque in Armanitola.
The Star Mosque was built in the first half of the nineteenth century by Mirza Golam Pir, a local landowner, in the Mughal manner, with three domes over the prayer hall. It was an ordinary neighbourhood mosque then, and had no stars.
Those came in 1926, when a businessman named Ali Jan Bepari paid for a renovation and had the surfaces covered in chinitikri — mosaic made from broken china and coloured glass set into white cement. Hundreds of blue stars were laid across the domes and the façade, with a crescent on the eastern front, and the building took the name it still carries: Tara Masjid, the Star Mosque.
The prayer hall was extended in 1987 with two more domes, making five. Inside, glazed tiles and floral mosaic run around the mihrabs and doorways.
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