Moorish Revival Architecture

Moorish Revival, also called Neo-Moorish, is an exotic architectural movement that grew out of Romanticist Orientalism, drawing on classic Moorish and Islamic architectural traditions for decorative vocabulary beyond the familiar classical and Gothic modes. Early examples appeared in English garden follies around 1812, with Edward Blore's 1826 Alupka Palace in Crimea marking a turning point toward serious architectural application, and the style gained wide prominence after the mid-nineteenth century across Europe and the Americas. Its buildings are marked by horseshoe and bulbous domes, pointed and polylobed arches of varying shapes, and intricate surface ornamentation drawn from Near Eastern Islamic sources. The style became especially popular for synagogues, particularly among Central European Jewish communities, as well as theaters, fraternal temples and civic buildings, and spread through Spain, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Russia, the United States and Latin America into the early twentieth century.