In Turkey, new mosque construction has transformed the landscape, filling it with neo-Ottoman architectural forms in cast cement. Whether the structure proposes a new vision of Turkish Sunni Islam or one based on an Ottoman architectural heritage, all new official and therefore visible mosques are controlled by the state Presidency of Religious Affairs or Diyanet. These buildings thereby demonstrate state power in constraining and controlling the form of practice. Thus, in Turkey the view of mosques as essentially political expressions of Islamist movements needs to be reconsidered in light of the fact that these are both a local expression of practice and a state expression of the power to control and contain practice within a certain style of building. In this paper, I trace the long history of mosque construction, destruction and reconstruction in the rural Yuntdag region of western Anatolia as it relates to villager visions of Islam. The paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2000-2010. Here, men from a number of villages once gathered in a small prayerhouse on Fridays. This prayerhouse was in a wild pasture, also used for a threshing ground, appropriate to a community of shepherds. Though no traces of the building remain, an old cemetery continues to be used and villagers describe the power emanating from the graves of major spiritual leaders buried there. From this early collective and modest prayerhouse, villagers demonstrate how they became more involved with the Ottoman and later Republican orthodoxization of practice when they built mosques inside their respective villages. While some villages preserve their Ottoman mosque, with pitched roof and interior calligraphic decoration and regard it as a link to a legacy of Islamic scholarship and practice from the Empire, others critique theirs as "narrow" and "old." Impatient, forward-looking villages have destroyed their "old" Ottoman mosques to make way for bigger, urban-style, domed structures, which paradoxically reflect a popularization of Ottoman architectural style. I consider the stories of preservation and destruction to examine different paths of Sunni modernity: one preserved in an effort to maintain a visual link to a legacy of Islamic scholarship, and another designed to reference urban modernity and prestigious Republican practice, which references Ottoman architectural styles.