Gjilan, the main town of eastern Kosovo

Gjilan doesn’t have Prizren’s postcard looks or Pristina’s capital-city buzz, and it doesn’t need them. It’s a lively, mid-sized town whose centre you can see in a morning, with the best of eastern Kosovo less than half an hour’s drive away. To my mind it’s the base missing from almost every route through Kosovo.

Kosovo’s third town

Gjilan (in Serbian, Gnjilane) counted 53,279 residents when the Kosovo Agency of Statistics (ASK) ran its 2024 census, roughly a thousand down on 2011. As a settlement, only Pristina and Prizren are larger. The municipality has 82,980 residents in 49 settlements, fourth in Kosovo after Pristina, Prizren and Ferizaj. The biggest villages around town are Livoç i Ulët (3,293), Malishevë (2,732), Livoç i Epërm (2,705) and Zhegër (2,655).

The Atik Mosque’s entry in the Ministry of Culture heritage database (DTK) has an intriguing aside about the town. It notes that the name Gilan already appears as a village in 1423, and that Gjilan’s founding as a town is usually put at around 1750, whereas the mosque dates from the early 1600s. In other words, the settlement is older than it’s often given credit for.

Things to do in Gjilan

Start with the Atik Mosque in Gjilan, also known as the Madrasa Mosque. The DTK dates it to between 1606 and 1609 and calls it the town’s first, with painted decoration in the dome and a minaret on a stone base. Directly opposite stands the house Mustafa Pasha built in 1887. It was a home, then a school, then a music school; it was damaged in the 2002 earthquake and restored in 2007 and 2008. Since 18 May 2021 it has been the town’s ethnological museum. I have no official opening hours or prices, so ask on the door.

The Kajmekam building in the centre is late 18th century, two storeys with a neoclassical-looking front. The DTK now describes it as the mayor’s office, although the name on its record calls it the regional museum, so I can’t promise you’ll get inside. It’s the building in this page’s header photo. The clock tower, which OpenStreetMap places less than a kilometre south of the Atik, is the one in the gallery.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Gjilan before prices climb.

Short trips out of town

Draganac Monastery sits about 9 km north in a straight line, according to OpenStreetMap, and has a Special Protective Zone under Law 03/L-039. To the south-east, about 10 km away by its record, the fort at Pogragjë overlooks the Llapushnica gorge at 567 m, with a 1.2-hectare enclosure, three rings of walls and an 8 by 8 m tower still standing up to 10 m high. The DTK places it in the 6th century and mentions coins found there from the mid-3rd.

To the north-east, at Llashticë, the DTK describes nine burial mounds from the 8th and 7th centuries BC, one of them 32 m across. And to the south, at Dunav, 800 m up, St Anne’s Church of 1938 is the only Catholic church in the municipality, according to its record. If museums are your thing, the others are gathered in museums in Kosovo.

The small municipalities around it

Gjilan is ringed by very small municipalities with pages of their own. Partesh, about 8 km south-west as the crow flies, has three villages and an 1861 church at Pasjan. Ranillug, about 11 km east, spreads 2,481 people over 13 hamlets. Both have Serbian-speaking majorities by mother tongue in the 2024 census, while in Gjilan municipality the majority speaks Albanian, with 642 Turkish speakers.

If you would rather have a local show you round, book a guided tour in Gjilan and choose by the reviews.

Getting there, sleeping and eating

I couldn’t find official bus timetables, though OpenStreetMap marks three bus stations in town. By car, Pristina is about 33 km away in a straight line. The FCDO warns that roads outside towns range from fair to poor and advises against driving after dark, and remember your GHIC isn’t valid here, so bring proper travel insurance.

For somewhere to stay, OpenStreetMap shows five hotels, three motels, two guesthouses and nine apartments in town, plus 41 restaurants, 61 cafés and 34 fast-food places. That’s what volunteers have mapped rather than a census. ASK counts 3,760 beds in the whole Gjilan region. I’d look near the centre so you can walk to the mosque and the museum.

Once your dates are set, check which hotels are still free in Gjilan before prices climb.