It is the setting of the Academy Award-nominated documentary film Honeyland, which depicts it as an abandoned village with no electricity and inhabited by one, and then two families.

The Yugoslav census of 1953 recorded 161 people of whom 148 were Turks, 71 Macedonians and 12 others.

The 1961 Yugoslav census recorded 116 people of whom 77 were Albanians, 6 Turks, 2 Bosniaks, 1 Macedonians and 30 others.

The 1971 census recorded 70 people of whom 33 were Albanians, 15 Turks, 8 Bosniaks and 14 others.

[1] As of the 2021 census, Bekirlija had 1 resident with the following ethnic composition:[2] This North Macedonia location article is a stub.