Turkey’s recent expansion into the world has been discussed in various dimensions: as a political project geared towards actively creating and controlling new diasporas, as an imperialist project geared at securing the AKP‘s domestic regime, and as an Islamist effort to unite the ‚umma‘ under Turkish leadership. A central, yet hitherto understudied aspect of these policies is the spatial strategies, whereby the AKP government, as well as related Quangos and religious organizations, have concretized their diasporic/imperial programs into building projects. These interventions in the built environment differ in function and shape. In most cases, however, they consist of highly symbolical structures like large-scale mosques, ‘Turkish Houses’ and cultural centers, which significantly alter the physical and symbolic space of the cities in which they are built. While the blueprint for these structures is centrally determined, the execution thereof, but also the meanings and functions they assume differ according to the legal, political, and cultural contexts of the countries in question. In this paper, we seek to unpack the AKP regime’s spatial strategies in what its actors conceive of as Turkey's 'domestic abroad' (Varadarajan, 2010), an area which potentially extends all over the world, but solidifies in symbolic regions like the Balkans and Western Europe. We examine the variations of these programs with two case studies; the Namazgah Mosque in Tirana, Albania and the proposed construction of a new Mosque in the former Muslim quarter (Mouraria) in Lisbon, Portugal. We discuss the processes and actors that propose, finance, and implement these projects. Who are the mosque-builders (from architects and civil engineers to fundraisers, bureaucrats and politicians)?; how do they make sense of larger imperial claims and notions of Muslim unity?; and how do they respond to the requests of local Muslim communities? How are these projects received in the countries of implementation, and what kind of debates and counter-debates do they evoke? We wish to gain a better understanding of how the ‘new Turkey’ of Erdogan and the AKP era has sought to reify itself through spatial strategies that extend well beyond the borders of the nation-state, but also how opposition to these projects can lead to their modification, appropriation, or cancellation and thereby undermine imperial claims.