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

Couples scraping away plaster accidentally uncovers a secret room in their house. Giuseppe Cadil and Valeria Ghiarusso knew their charming apartment was rich with history from the moment they bought it. But when they decided to knock down a wall back in 2013, they learned just how rich it was. A close inspection revealed tiny scribbles that hinted something was hiding behind the plaster. They just had no idea what it could be or what it meant for their home. Giuseppe Cadil and Valeria Ghiarusso first moved into their charming Via Porta di Castro Sicily flat in the early 2000s. The old apartment building is located on land that once was the Comonia River, nearby the Plazo di Normani aka the Royal Palace of Palermo. 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 the wall, said Giuseppe. But after wiping down the walls a bit, they noticed something was even more peculiar. Then they 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 over a blue background in the 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 Gattino Basil, a connoisseur of Palermo history. He described the writing as artisan versions of the decorative calligraphy popular in the 1700s. He went on to tell Salvatore Ferro of the Journal de 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 rubisco, an entirely Sicilian legacy of Arabesque design, he stated. The Sicilian artisan, who did know Arabic, mistook calligraphic verses for decoration and emulated them. Sicilian carts were full of rubisci, Gattino 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 were clear indications of this, said Gattino. 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 of 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, Gattino explained, it faces east, towards Mecca, and the walls are of identical size, 3.5 meters 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 repeated lamp pattern. But since the people who built this 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 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 Arabic letters, completely lacking logical sense. But Chiara Rummanushi-Hein 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 esotericism. 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 the sofa and desk in it, and, out of respect for the Muslim culture, we do not serve alcoholic beverages in this room, Giuseppe Cadil 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.