Excerpt:
The garden of a 500-year-old former Ottoman mosque in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia, known as 'Grand Mosque' among locals, operates as a bar in the evenings, upsetting the country's Muslim minority.
Neval Konuk, a faculty member at the Department of Art History at Marmara University in Istanbul, who took photos of the place personally, said that the garden of the historical mosque turns into a place of entertainment in the evening hours.
"The construction of the Koca Mahmut Paşa Mosque, called the Great Mosque in Sofia, began in 1451 during the reign of Mahmut Paşa. However, the work was completed only 20 years after Paşa's death in 1494," Konuk, who traveled to Sofia to examine the condition of the historical building, told Turkish daily Milliyet.