Qibla direction in Yoshkar-Ola

How to face the Qibla in Yoshkar-Ola

Stand where you will pray and find north first. Then turn towards south and move a further 12.9° towards west: the result is the bearing of 192.9°. A small error of a few degrees is forgiven by most scholars, but aiming simply at south would leave you about 13° off.

Scholars agree that someone who can see the Kaaba must face it exactly, while someone far away faces its direction (jihat al-Ka‘bah) as precisely as reasonably possible. If a mosque is nearby, its mihrab and prayer lines are the easiest reference, since they were set when the building was laid out. At home, mark the direction once with tape or a small arrow so the whole family prays the same way.

Why a flat map shows a different direction

A straight line drawn on a flat (Mercator) map from Yoshkar-Ola to Mecca points to 189.7° (south), 3.2° away from the correct 192.9°. That map line is a rhumb line: it keeps the same compass heading all the way, but it is 1 km longer than the true shortest route. The Qibla follows the great circle, the shortest path on the curved Earth, which is why the bearing differs.

The angle on this page is the initial bearing of the great circle from 56.6388° N, 47.8908° E to the Kaaba (21.4225° N, 39.8262° E). It is the method used by mosque architects and by every serious Qibla calculator, and it gives one exact answer for each point on Earth.

Distance from Yoshkar-Ola to Mecca and Medina

Mecca is 3,971 km from Yoshkar-Ola as the crow flies, and Medina, the city of the Prophet ﷺ, is 3,639 km away. A direct flight would take roughly 5 h 10 min, although most pilgrims from Yoshkar-Ola connect through Jeddah or Medina airport.

Clocks in Yoshkar-Ola run the same time as Mecca all year. Prayer times, however, depend on the sun at your own location, so always use the prayer times of Yoshkar-Ola rather than those of Mecca.

Finding the Qibla with the sun in Yoshkar-Ola

On 365 days of 2027, the sun passes exactly through the Qibla direction of Yoshkar-Ola while it is well above the horizon. At that moment, facing the sun means facing Mecca. The effect is most frequent in January (31 days); for example, on 1 January 2027 it happens at 12:47 local time.

The sun is never opposite the Qibla of Yoshkar-Ola during daylight, so the shadow method does not apply here; the left-hand column is the one to use.

Twice a year the sun passes directly over the Kaaba, on 28 May 2027 and 16 July 2027. Both moments are in daylight in Yoshkar-Ola: at 12:18 and 12:27 local time, face the sun and you face the Qibla exactly, anywhere in the city.

Yoshkar-Ola compared with other cities

Compared with Moscow, 643 km away, the Qibla in Yoshkar-Ola is turned 16.6° further clockwise (192.9° against 176.4°), and Mecca is 150 km farther away. The nearest city with its own Qibla page, Cheboksary (69 km), prays towards 192.1°, a difference of 0.9°.

Across the 158 cities in Russia on this site, the Qibla ranges from 148.7° in Kaliningrad to 305.3° in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatskiy, a spread of 156.6°. That is too large to use one national direction, so each city has its own bearing.

See all cities on the Qibla page for Russia.

Qibla in cities near Yoshkar-Ola

• Cheboksary192.1° · 69 km
• Kazan’195.2° · 121 km
• Nizhny Novgorod186.8° · 241 km
• Kirov195.0° · 242 km
• Ulyanovsk194.5° · 259 km
• Nizhnekamsk199.5° · 267 km