Leočina (Serbian Cyrillic: Леочина, Albanian: Leçinë) is a settlement in the Skenderaj municipality in Kosovo. The rural settlement lies on a cadastral area with the same name, of 784 hectares. It lies 702 m over sea level. The village has an Albanian majority and Serbian minority; in the 1991 census, it had 1069 inhabitants.
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Map of Leqin%C3%AB
Geography
It lies in the hilly region of Drenica.
History
It is mentioned for the first time in a charter of Serbian King Stephen Milutin (r. 1282–1321), dating to 1314. It is mentioned in an Ottoman defter (tax register) of 1485, as a great village, divided in an upper and lower oblast, with a total of 62 Serb houses, and two Orthodox priests.
The Church of St. John, which lies on the cemetery, was built in the village in the 14th century, and reconstructed in the 16th century. Until latter the half of the 19th century it was known as the Church of St. Nicholas. It was expertly conserved and reconstructed in 1967 and is protected by the Republic of Serbia. There exist remains of another 14th-century church, the so-called "Kaluđerska-" or "Preobraška crkva" and one more church, a total of three.
On the night of May 19, 1998, members of the Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army kidnapped Dostan Šmigić (aged 41), a worker in the institute for labour market in Skenderaj, on the Čitak-Leočina road and took him to an unknown location.