In 1342, a place called
Morava was visited by
Serbian King
Stefan Dušan (later
Emperor, r. 1331–1355).
A fort was built nearby in the 14th century.
Gornja Morava ("Upper Morava") was known simply as Morava under
Ottoman rule, and it extended west of the Upper
Žegra–Budriga–
Cernica line, thus Gjilan stayed in the
oblast (province) of Topanica, whose provincial seat was
Novo Brdo. In the 1455
Ottoman defter of the District of Branković, there were 41
Christian households registered in Gjilan. The town was served by the priest Božidar. After the conquest of Kosovo by the Ottoman Empire,
Islam was introduced to the region. Haji Kalfa (first half of the 17th century) mentions Morava being 17 days from
Constantinople. Gjilan became a
kadiluk around 1780, and 20–25 years later a large village. The exact date of Gjilan’s establishment remains uncertain. In the 17th century, the Ottoman traveller Evliya Çelebi referred to the settlement as
Morava, describing it as a cadillac within the
Sanjak of Vučitrn. Local tradition suggests that Gjilan emerged as a settlement around 1750 and developed into an urban centre by 1772. Its growth was closely linked to the decline of Novo Brdo, which in the Middle Ages was among the largest commercial, economic, and mining centres in the Balkans. In the second half of the 19th century, the feudal Gjinaj family relocated from Novo Brdo and built their residences in the area that is now Gjilan, further shaping the town’s development.
Modern history In 1985, Gjilan was the site of an
incident involving a
Serbian farmer who had a glass bottle shatter inside his
rectum, before going to the local police and blaming two
Kosovar Albanians. The incident served to increase and inflame ethnic tensions throughout
Yugoslavia, namely between Serbs and Albanians. The farmer later admitted that he put the glass bottle inside his rectum himself. In 1999,
Camp Monteith was established outside the city as a base of operations for
KFOR during
Operation Joint Guardian, on the site of a destroyed
Yugoslav military base which was handed over to the
Kosovo Protection Corps in 2007 after the U.S. military downsized their number of troops. Gjilan has also served as the regional
headquarters of the
UNMIK International Police task force from 1999. On 24 April 2002, a 5.7-magnitude earthquake struck the municipality of Gjilan, resulting in one fatality. In 2020, the cities of Gjilan and
Kumanovo,
North Macedonia came closer through a
new border point which was built in the village of Stançiq. == Geography ==