page_title: Kochan
section_title: Religion
hierarchical_section_title: Kochan / Religion
caption_attribution_description: Плоча, вградена в джамията в село Кочан. На нея е изписано името "Мустафа Малик" (Владетел Мустафа). Текстът не може да бъде разчетен напълно, тъй като това е само фрагмент от плочата.
context_page_description: Kochan is a village in Southwestern Bulgaria. It is located in Satovcha Municipality, Blagoevgrad Province.
context_section_description: The population of the village is almost exclusively Muslim. There is a small minority of Romani people most of which converted to Evangelism in the beginning of the 21st century. In historic times the population confessed the Thracian Polytheistic religion. In the Middle Ages it supposedly converted to Orthodox Christianity though some researches maintain that the population may have confessed Paulicianism or Bogomilism. In the 15th century, after the Ottoman Empire established its rule in the region, a steady process of conversion to Islam begun. An Ottoman registry about the falcon breeders and trainers from 1482 enlists 21 Muslim falcon breeders from Kochan. Further documents from 1444, 1464, 1478, 1519, 1530 and 1569 show a steady increase of the Muslim population of Kochan and the neighboring villages. The first mosque was constructed in 1545.
  In 1912 the Bulgarian army acceded Kochan to the present Bulgarian state. Unlike the inhabitants of most neighboring villages, the inhabitants of Kochan chose to convert to Christianity when they were posed an ultimatum by the Bulgarian army and they avoided the genocide which took place in many villages in Rhodope. The mayor and the imam of the village gathered the people and explained to them that according to the Koran it is permissible to convert to other religion when threaten by death, on the condition to remain a true Muslim in the heart. When the army arrived, it destroyed the mosque and built a church. Eventually the church was dismissed and the mosque and Islam restored by the end of 1913 with the beginning of the Second Balkan War and the establishment of the Provisional Government of Western Thrace.
  During the socialist regime in Bulgaria, in Kochan, as everywhere in state, the confession of any religion was limited and the access to the mosque banned. Eventually in 1989 the minaret of the mosque was ruined in such a manner that it damaged the whole building. Immediately after the rise of democracy in the late 1989, an effort to repair the mosque began. It was finished to its present state in 1991.
caption: Medieval inscription on the mosque in Kochan.
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