Islam in The Balkans

Haji Hassan Aga Jamia (Mosque)

built in 1864

Call to Prayer during the Balkan Wars (1912-1913)

Shepherd

Ribnovo village

the Rhodope Mountains, Bulgaria

Softa Baba Teke, the tyurbe (mausoleum) of Sabri Hussayn in Tutrakan, Bulgaria. He is known as Softa Baba, and is venerated as a saint by the Bulgarian Alevis. He lived in the late 19th to the mid 20th century, and was a well respected Naqshbandi teacher.

The ground the tyurbe stands on is soft, so it is supported by stones, which, along with relics from the shrine, are often stolen. Softa Baba’s family runs the shrine, growing apricots and peaches and selling rakia.

A Macedonian Yuruk girl carries a tray of henna during a wedding near Štip, Republic of Macedonia

—

Zuvdija Hodžić, Gusinjska godina (via mytypeiscoffee)

I come to Stambol and they ask me: Who am I? I say I’m a Turk and they shake their heads and say: No, you’re not, you are Arnaut (Albanian). I come to Skadar as an Arnaut, they say to me: No, you are Bosniak. I come to Sarajevo, people ask me where I’m from and who I am. I say: Bosniak. And Bosniaks say: Come on, man, how come? You are Montenegrin, you only have our religion. And one from Podgorica doesn’t recognize that either and he tells me: You are a Turk, what else. Now, you find your way in all of that. Who and what am I? No one.

A mosque in a village called Hisardžik near the town of Prijepolje in the southern Serbian region of Sandžak is the owner of a very valuable artifact - a Qur’an that is 400 years old. 

It was first believed that the Qur’an is 300 years old because the first page has an inscription that say “in the 1116 Hijri year” (1706 in the Gregorian calendar). However a new study conducted by experts of the National Library of Belgrade has shown that the Qur’an is at least 400 years old and might be the oldest in the Balkans. 

With the help of experts from Belgrade the damages on the Qur’an were fixed and afterwards it was displayed at the Prijepolje museum for 10 days and then it was returned to the mosque in Hisardžik where it belongs.