Kedeyre Misskiy

A 450-year-old mosque built by a man called Ali Adafi Kaleyge. Ali Adafi Kaleyge, along with four others were the first to resettle in Fuvahmulah, after the island was deserted for a second time in their history after being forced to flee due to an epidemic that killed a large portion of the island’s population.

The mosque well is built in the middle of what used to be a rectangular bath made of limestone. The intricately carved stonework in this bath is one of the last remining mark of the exceptional talent of the islanders.

In the 1980’s, Norwegian ethnographer Thor Heyerdahl excavated the Kedeyre area and unearthed the previously half buried bath. The bath has a megalithic stairway descending from the east wall. Large, hard limestone from the island bedrock was used to build the structure. It had been cut as straight and smooth as a panel of glass with a precision that belied both its size and toughness of material. 

According to Heyedharl, the people who designed these walls followed an important aesthetic or magico-religious tradition known only to a few restricted pre-European civilizations. The architecture and specialized masonry techniques used in the bath and other epic structures found in Fuvahmulah is a lead that could connect Maldives to some of the great seafaring civilizations that had roamed the high seas centuries before European maritime history began.