Bayrakli Mosque

The only currently preserved mosque in Samokov is the Bayrakli Mosque, called the Ali Effendi Mosque, also the Old Mosque or the Mosque of Yokusha (hill). Bayrakli Mosque was built around 1845 by order of the local prince Mehmet Husref Pasha, and according to oral reports it was financed by his uncles from the village of Shishmanovo, where the Pasha's mother, a Bulgarian, was from, in gratitude for the gift of forests on the Chamurli Mountain. After restoration in the 1950s and 1960s, the Bayrakli Mosque was opened in August 1966 as a museum site and declared a monument of "national importance".