Gjakova (Đakovica in Serbian) is the bazaar town. Its Çarshia e Madhe, or Grand Bazaar, is the longest in Kosovo and one of the oldest in the Balkans: a kilometre of cobbled lanes with some 500 small Ottoman-style wooden shops, where silversmiths, tailors, qeleshe hatmakers and the renowned craftsmen of wooden cradles (djepa), for which Gjakova is famous across the country, still work. Strolling through it at sunset, amid the smell of coffee and the sounds of the workshops, is a journey back to the Ottoman Kosovo that survived the centuries.
But Gjakova is also a town of hard memories. In March 1999, during the Kosovo war, Serbian forces set fire to much of the Grand Bazaar and the Hadum Mosque, its 16th-century spiritual heart. What you see today is largely a careful reconstruction, made with the same techniques and materials, that gave the bazaar back its soul. That mix of Ottoman beauty and recent resilience gives the town a special atmosphere, melancholic and proud at the same time.
This guide covers the essentials with a practical eye: how to visit the Grand Bazaar and its artisans, the Hadum Mosque and the Clock Tower, the stone bridges over the Erenik, the Ethnographic Museum and Çabrat hill with its views, plus where to try the local cooking (tavë Gjakovare and sausage-shaped baklava) and how to use the town as a base for exploring western Kosovo, with the monasteries of Deçan and Peja and the Rugova Gorge close by.
Gjakova grew up in the 16th century around the Hadum Mosque and its Grand Bazaar, which came to have more than 500 shops and ranked among the most important bazaars of the Ottoman region, alongside those of Istanbul and Skopje. For centuries it was a centre of trade and craftsmanship, with guilds of silversmiths, tailors and tanners, and an important hub of Albanian culture. The Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and above all the Kosovo war of 1998-99 hit the town hard: in March 1999 Serbian forces burned much of the bazaar and the Hadum Mosque, along with its valuable library. After the war, the bazaar was almost entirely rebuilt, respecting its Ottoman form. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Dukagjin at the foot of the Dinaric Alps: rebuilt Ottoman bazaars, the great monasteries of Peć and Dečani, and the spectacular Rugova Canyon.
Read the history of The west (Peja, Gjakova, Rugova) →They depart from Prizren, 31 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Few cities tell their story in their very name. Gjakova (Đakovica to Serbs) sits on the Dukagjini plain (Metohija in Serbian), in western Kosovo. Since ancient times, the routes linking the Balkan interior with the Adriatic coast and with Albania have crossed here. Caravans, merchants and armies passed through this crossroads, and a market grew up by the river that would in time become a city.
The origin of the name is disputed and has become part of local folklore. One popular tradition traces it to the Albanian words 'gjak' (blood) and 'va' (ford), so 'the ford of blood'. This may refer to some violent event, or to the old blood feuds governed by the customary law of the mountains. Another explanation, from historians, links the name to a certain Jakup or to the family that founded the settlement. Whatever the real etymology, the name has stayed tied to that sense of frontier and intensity that marks the city.
Gjakova's great leap from simple market to important city came with the Ottomans. After conquering the region in the 15th century, the Ottoman Empire organised the territory and encouraged trading centres to grow. In the late 16th century a local notable, Hadum Aga (Sylejman Efendi Vokshi), paid for a mosque and the buildings around it. With them came the heart that would define Gjakova for the next four centuries: its Grand Bazaar.
The Çarshia e Madhe, the Grand Bazaar, grew up around the Hadum Mosque, built around 1594-95, and became the economic and social engine of Gjakova. At its height it had more than 500 shops, workshops, hans (caravan inns) and public fountains. It stretched for almost a kilometre of cobbled lanes lined with low wooden houses. Chroniclers of the time listed it among the great bazaars of the Ottoman world, in the same breath as the Grand Bazaar of Istanbul or the bazaar of Skopje.
The bazaar wasn't just a market: it was a city within the city, organised by guilds. Each trade had its own street or quarter: silversmiths, tailors (terzinjtë), leather tanners (tabakët), coppersmiths, makers of the qeleshe (the white Albanian felt cap) and carpenters. The carpenters made the djepa, hand-painted wooden cradles that made Gjakova famous across the region. The guilds regulated quality, prices and apprentice training, and kept up their own civic and religious life, with their own mosques, fountains and inns.
Through the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, Gjakova was also an important cultural and political centre of the Albanian world. Its people were mostly Albanian Muslims, with Catholic and Orthodox communities too, and they produced wealthy merchants, Islamic scholars, poets and activists. The city played an active part in the Albanian national awakening of the 19th century. It was one of the centres linked to the League of Prizren (1878), the movement that demanded autonomy and unity for the Albanian lands. The great powers were planning to divide those lands as the Ottoman Empire went into crisis. That fighting spirit and strong sense of identity would stay with Gjakova into the following century.
The 20th century began violently for Gjakova. In the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 the Ottoman Empire lost its European territories, and the region passed to the Kingdom of Serbia, inside what would later become Yugoslavia. The handover was traumatic. Those years brought fighting, reprisals and destruction that damaged much of the city's historic heritage. They also began a long period of tension between the Albanian majority and the Serbian and Yugoslav authorities.
Between the wars, and later under Tito's socialist Yugoslavia, Gjakova stayed a mainly Albanian city. Its bazaar was still active, though declining in the face of industrialisation and new ways of trading. Kosovo gained autonomous status within the Republic of Serbia, which reached its peak with the 1974 Yugoslav Constitution. For Kosovo Albanians those years brought progress in education and in the use of their language, although the tensions never fully went away.
Everything changed in the late 1980s. In 1989 the Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević revoked Kosovo's autonomy. He imposed direct rule from Belgrade and pushed Albanians out of the administration, schools and state-owned companies. Kosovo Albanians first answered with peaceful resistance and a parallel system of institutions. Later, when that brought no results, the Kosovo Liberation Army (UÇK) emerged. By the late 1990s the spiral of repression and insurgency had turned into open war, and it would hit Gjakova extremely hard.
The Kosovo War (1998-1999) was especially cruel to Gjakova. The city and its district were overwhelmingly Albanian and close to the border with Albania, where weapons and refugees crossed. They became one of the places hit hardest by the offensive of Serbian and Yugoslav forces. On 24 March 1999 NATO began its bombing campaign to stop the abuses against Albanian civilians, and repression on the ground then grew worse.
In the days after the bombing began, Serbian forces deliberately set fire to much of the Çarshia e Madhe, the Grand Bazaar. The fire consumed hundreds of wooden shops and workshops and reached the Hadum Mosque. It damaged the building and completely destroyed its famous library of old manuscripts and books, an irreplaceable loss for Kosovo's cultural heritage. The fire was a symbolic and physical blow to the very heart of the city.
Gjakova also lived through some of the darkest moments of the war in human terms. There were many massacres of civilians, enforced disappearances and mass expulsions of people into Albania. Whole neighbourhoods were emptied and many families lost their men, some of whom are still listed as missing. International bodies documented these events, and they formed part of later trials over crimes committed during the conflict. The war ended in June 1999, when Yugoslav forces withdrew and the international mission arrived. It left the city marked by grief and by the visible scars of destruction.
Today's Gjakova is, to a large extent, a rebuilt city. After the war, one of the biggest recovery efforts went into the Grand Bazaar. It was rebuilt almost entirely on its Ottoman layout, with the same traditional techniques, the same wood and the same type of roofs, so it once again looks the way it did historically. The Hadum Mosque and the Clock Tower were restored too. The bazaar regained its shape and filled up with craftspeople again, and that is one of the strongest symbols of the city's resilience.
Kosovo declared independence from Serbia in 2008, a step recognised by much of the international community but not by Serbia or some other countries. Gjakova lies fully within the new state, and its population today is almost entirely Albanian. The small Serbian and Catholic communities that had lived in the city shrank dramatically during and after the conflict. The memory of the war is still very present. There are monuments and cemeteries for the victims and the fallen, and the question of the missing remains unresolved.
Even so, Gjakova looks ahead. With its rebuilt bazaar, its mosques, its stone bridges over the Erenik and its café culture, it is one of the most appealing places to visit in Kosovo. More and more travellers come to discover its Ottoman beauty and its intense history. The city keeps its reputation as a cultural centre with proud people, and it celebrates its carnival. It keeps alive crafts that have disappeared elsewhere, such as making wooden cradles. It is also a gateway to western Kosovo, with the medieval monasteries of Deçan and Peja and the mountains of the Rugova Canyon close by. In short, Gjakova is a place where beauty and memory share every cobbled street.
