Kočani

Kočani stands in a broad valley below the Osogovo mountains, east of Skopje. Roman and Byzantine remains attest to earlier settlement here, but the town's name first appears in a charter of 1337, recording the gift of the church of St Demetrius by the nobleman Jovan Oliver. Two stone tower residences, thought to date from the sixteenth or seventeenth century, are reminders of its later history.

The town came under Ottoman rule early in the fifteenth century. When the traveller Evliya Çelebi visited in 1662, he recorded six hundred households, a mosque, a smaller prayer house, an inn and fifteen craft shops. Kočani grew little during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, remaining a modest town in the valley beneath the mountains.