The mosque was dedicated in 1508, or the year 914 by the Islamic calendar, and an Arabic inscription above its entrance records the moment with formal grace. It was raised, the writing declares, for the glory of Khan Meñli I Giray, asking that Allah forgive the sins of the khan and his children, and dating the work to the month of Muharram in the year nine hundred and fourteen. Meñli Giray was among the most powerful rulers of the Crimean Khanate, and the mosque he endowed became the heart of the settlement that grew around it. It is widely believed that the building's pale, whitewashed walls are the reason the town was ever called Aqmescit, the White Mosque, a name it carried for centuries. Few buildings can claim to have named the city that surrounds them.

The mosque's long life was not untroubled. After the Second World War it fell into neglect, and for several years its rooms were put to a purpose far from prayer, used as a workshop for making book covers. The deeper wound lay in what had happened to the people who had prayed there. In 1944 Stalin's Soviet government deported the Crimean Tatars, the mosque's community, en masse from their homeland, an exile that scattered them for decades and left their mosques empty. The Kebir Mosque stood through those silent years as a shell of its former self, its congregation gone, its walls repurposed, a monument to a community forced away from the ground its ancestors had held since the Middle Ages.

The story turns with the return of the Crimean Tatars from deportation in the late twentieth century. In 1989 the old mosque was handed back to the Muslim community, and in late October 1991 the work of reconstruction began, restoring a building that had waited half a century for its people to come home. The Kebir Mosque became once again a principal center of worship, serving for years as the residence of the Mufti and the seat of the Spiritual Direction of the Muslims of Crimea. Its grounds grew to include a madrasah, an Islamic school, and a Crimean Tatar library. From a khan's dedication in 1508 to a community's homecoming, the white-walled mosque has outlasted empires and exile alike, and it endures as the living root of the city.

What makes the Kebir Mosque remarkable is less any single feature than its sheer persistence. It has been reconstructed many times over the centuries, patched and repaired and altered by generation after generation, so that the building standing today is a palimpsest of all the hands that kept it up. It watched the Crimean Khanate rise and fall, saw the Russian Empire lay a new capital around it, endured a Soviet century that emptied and repurposed it, and survived to serve the faithful once more. Newer and grander mosques have since risen in Simferopol, but none can claim what this modest structure holds: the distinction of being the oldest building in the city, and the origin of its very name. To stand before its whitewashed walls is to touch the single oldest thread still running through the fabric of Simferopol, unbroken across more than five hundred years.