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Yenidze – history
If you arrive in Dresden by train, you'll catch sight of it just before the main station: a building that looks like a mosque, with a minaret and a colourful glass dome. But it is in fact a former cigarette factory – the Yenidze, built from 1907 to 1909 for Hugo Zietz and his “Orientalische Tabak- und Cigarettenfabrik Yenidze” (Oriental Tobacco and Cigarette Factory Yenidze). The name came from a tobacco town in what was then Ottoman northern Greece; exactly which one is given differently by different sources.
Why a factory looks like a mosque
In Dresden's city centre, no buildings were allowed that were recognisable as factories. The architect Martin Hammitzsch turned this to his advantage: he gave the building the form of a mosque – supposedly modelled on a tomb in Cairo – and hid the factory chimney in the minaret. At the same time it was an advertisement for the house brand “Salem Aleikum”; before the war an illuminated sign greeted railway travellers. The people of Dresden called it the “Tabakmoschee”, the tobacco mosque.
Technology and dome
Behind the oriental façade lies modern engineering: a reinforced-concrete frame calculated by the concrete pioneer Benno Löser – one of the early buildings of its kind in Germany. The building is 62 metres high and the dome 20 metres, glazed in shades of emerald and ruby with a golden tip; at night it glows from within. The building has around 600 different windows. The workers once took their breaks beneath the dome, and cigarettes were rolled on five floors.
The architect Martin Hammitzsch
Martin Hammitzsch, born in 1878 in Plauen near Dresden, was expelled from an architects' association because of the mosque building. Later he made a political career: he was a city councillor, joined the NSDAP in 1935 and became a senior government official in the Saxon Ministry of the Interior. In 1936 he married Angela Raubal, Adolf Hitler's half-sister. He died in May 1945 in Oberwiesenthal.
Reemtsma, war and GDR
In 1924 the Reemtsma group bought the factory. In February 1945 the south wing and the dome were badly damaged; after the war, cigarette production continued until 1953. In the GDR the building served as a warehouse for raw tobacco and as the administrative offices of the state-owned tobacco trade.
Rescue, fairy-tale readings and today
After 1990 a property fund bought the building and had it restored from 1994 to 1997 for around 75 million marks: the south wing was rebuilt, and the dome got back its 860 square metres of coloured glass, following the original specifications. Today the Yenidze is an office building. Visitors can go up to the dome restaurant and, in summer, onto the roof terrace some 60 metres up. From 1997 to 2020 there were fairy-tale readings in the glass dome, with stories from the 1001 Nights – these readings no longer take place today.
As of: 10/2026
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