Couple Scraping Away Plaster Accidentally Uncovers A Secret Room In Their House

They had big plans for the Palermo place, hoping to knock down a wall and open up the space. But their renovation project would be met with… complications.

See, when Giuseppe and Valeria began, they noticed the plaster was oddly damp. “There was a leak inside of a wall,” said Giuseppe. But after wiping down the walls a bit, they noticed something even more peculiar.

They then detached the wet upper layer of plaster to reveal something nearly magical. “Cleaning it up a bit I realized that there was Arabic writing on it,” he continued. Giuseppe detailed the gold and silver lettering was painted over a blue background in a little room hidden inside the apartment.

“I would never have imagined that the writing covered all four walls,” Giuseppe said. Due to costs, Giuseppe and Valeria waited before getting a restoration expert to assess the mystery behind the walls, but when they eventually did, the couple was astonished by the finding.

They had Gaetano Basile, a connoisseur in Palermo history, assess the golden wall scratches, which included tughra-shaped designs. He described the writing as “artisan versions” of the decorative calligraphy popular in the 1700s.

He went on to tell Salvatore Ferro of the Giornale di Sicilia newspaper that these markings aren’t of the religious or spiritual variety, but rather they’re simply decorative. “This is a well-known part of our culture, marked by the invention of ‘rabbisco,’ an entirely Sicilian legacy of arabesque design,” he stated.

“The Sicilian artisan, who did not know Arabic, mistook calligraphic verses for decoration, and emulated them. Sicilian carts were full of ‘rabbischi.’” Gaetano continued. Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery!

“It is likely that the house belonged to a North African nobleman or merchant who had made his home in Palermo around the later 1700s. The owner basically had a mosque built in his house. There are clear indications of this,” said Gaetano. And there you have it… right?

As you could imagine, Giuseppe and Valeria were stunned. There was an assumed Islamic place of worship in their very own apartment. And though it’s odd that the supposed mosque was hidden in plain sight, based on the Islamic history in Sicily, it isn’t so odd that it exists.

Today, Palermo holds more than 25,000 immigrants, many of which come from countries with large Muslim populations, such as Bangladesh. Its Arab-Norman architecture only adds to the multiculturalism.

The Imam of Palermo, explained the past of Sicilian religious establishments. “Every church here used to be a mosque, which used to be a synagogue, which used to be a church which was a mosque. This is the history of Sicily.”

As for the couple’s secret mosque, Gaetano explained “it faces east,” towards Mecca, and “the walls are of an identical size – 3.5 by 3.5 meters.” The more they searched, the more they found.

“It has doors located in such a way as to prevent the placement of furniture, and the ceiling has a repeating lamp pattern.” But since the people who built the room aren’t around to confirm its initial intentions… there’s been quite a bit of debate.

After mainstream media declared the room to be a mosque, researchers from the University of Heidelberg and the University of Bonn, both of which are German, decided to do a bit more research on the mysterious blue space.

According to Professor Werner Arnold of Heidelberg, the wall text appeared to include a mix of Syriac and Arab letters, completely lacking logical sense. But Chiara Riminucci-Heine of the University of Bonn on the other hand… suggested the room was intended for a magician’s occult practices in relation to “Islamic masonry and esoterism.”

And then Giulia Gallini, an expert in the history of Islamic art and architecture, threw in her two cents, saying the blue room is missing one super important thing to be considered a mosque: the mihrab, or the “semicircular prayer niche.” Either way, the journalistic duo was in awe.

The couple cared too much about respecting deep-seated culture to turn it into a fancy powder room. “We wanted to give the proper weight to this discovery and convey our love for the historic center. Too often things from our past are destroyed instead of bringing them back to life,” Giuseppe explained.

“This is why we decided to keep it as we found it: we put in a sofa and a desk and, out of respect for the Muslim culture, we do not serve alcoholic beverages in this room,” Giuseppe Cadili continued.

Though there’s still much debate surrounding the nature of Palermo’s blue room, sometimes called the “Arab Decor Room,” or more whimsically, Palermo’s “chamber of secrets,” it’s undeniably beautiful. This isn’t the first time a chunk of history has been hidden behind the face of a modern residence.