NB: This post is not in any way meant to be a guide to the situation in Kosovo, which I have written a great deal about in other places and at other times; it is a record of a road trip that I took last week, with a few reflections based on my previous experiences and stealing from Brian Aldiss’s 1965 books, Cities and Stones.

I was back in Kosovo last week for only the third time since independence, and the first time in five years, last week, and took Monday afternoon off to visit some parts of the country I had not been to before: the Gračanica monastery near Prishtina, the ruins of the Roman city of Ulpiana nearby, and Kosovo’s second city, Prizren. (I took a few photos back in 2006 as well.)

I was armed with two important tools. The Bradt Guide to Kosovo is co-written by my friend Verena Knaus, and was really helpful; and the Maps.Me app has brilliant downloadable maps for when you run out of data allowance, as long as you think ahead and download them before setting off (many thanks to the Hertz rental office at the Grand Hotel for suggesting that).

Gračanica monastery, just south of Prishtina, is in the Serbian-inhabited enclave of the same name. It’s really quite spectacular (and I was very lucky here and later with the sunlight). The inside is covered with vivid frescoes dating from the 15th century, truly breathtaking. Brian Aldiss again:

…it comes as a surprise to motor into the grubby little village of Gračanica and find in its centre one of the most harmonious of Byzantine monastic churches. Gračanica, by a miracle, is well-preserved, although work is going on to restore it inside and outside. Outside it is the loveliest of all monasteries except Dečani . It is square, and its central cupola is surrounded by four smaller cupolas, with much curved roofing to accentuate their upward sweep. The walls are of blocks of stone interleaved with brick, forming an harmonious and pleasing pattern.

When Brian Aldiss went in 1964, the scaffolding for the restoration works rather spoiled his view of the frescoes; sixty years later, we have unconstrained access to these remarkable colourful narrative stories, which fill every almost square centimetre of the interior. Taking photos of the frescoes is forbidden, and I can’t remember how I obtained this image. Wikipedia has a great selection of them.

Brian Aldiss described the surrounding settlement of Gračanica as a “grubby little village”. These days, it is the closest of the ethnic Serbian enclaves to Prishtina, less than 10km from the centre of the capital. The traffic was terrible and it took me over half an hour. Gračanica is bustling (no longer little, and not too grubby), filled with Serbian flags and political posters, and a more recent monument, a statue of semi-mythical Serbian warrior Miloš Obilić just outside the monastery. The 2004 riots in Kosovo were sparked here, so I was struck by the lack of any particular air of menace – indeed, teenagers were thumbing lifts on the road out of town, which suggests a lack of existential threat. Two weeks before, a senior Serbian diplomat had told me that Serbs in Kosovo are living under inhuman conditions; I did not go to the north of Kosovo on this trip, but the people of Gračanica seemed OK to me.

None of the youngsters would accept my offer of a lift, not because they didn’t trust me, but because I was only going as far as the ancient Roman ruins of Ulpiana, less than 2 km from Gračanica. I reflected that I’ve done quite well for Roman remains in the former Yugoslavia, with Ljubljana, Sremska Mitrovica, Stobi and an unblogged visit to Doclea north of Podgorica in 2022.These are nicely laid out with explanatory signs. There were only two other tourists there. (No Brian Aldiss quote – only minor excavations had happened by 1964.) It was rebuilt by Justinian after an earthquake in 527; so there are ancient Christian buildings built on top of the more ancient pagan ones destroyed in the quake.

Rather than double back to Prishtina and take the highway, I decided to take the mountain road past Lipljan, Shtime and Suva Reka. The road west of Shtime was spectacular but a bit hair-raising – though not as hair-raising as our drive in 2006. As in 2006, I came across a roadside monument, this time to casualties of the 1999 war, and a lot bigger – dominating the road junction at 42.438627, 20.922865. They were killed on 10 May 1999, and again I have found nothing in English about the incident; it was just after NATO bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade, and after the murder of Kosovar political leader Fehmi Agani, and many other awful things were happening in the neighbourhood.

And so I arrived in Prizren, which is nicely framed by the mountains. Brian Aldiss stayed for four days; I stayed for two and a half hours, until the light started fading.

Adiss described it as “a quiet little city of twenty-six thousand inhabitants, full of Turkish houses, red tled roofs, and mosques, and pleasant waters flowing everywhere.” The population is now more like 150,000, but the rest is still true. I tried to find Verena’s top recommended restaurant for lunch, the Besimi – Beska, but got confused and ended up at her second recommendation, the Fish House, where I had a nice whole grilled trout for 7 euro. (I found the Beska in time for a cup of coffee before I left.) The Fish House is right beside the baths, which are currently being restored but looked great in the sunlight.

The main tourist attraction is the Museum of the League of Prizren, telling the story of the Albanian nationalist movement of the 1870s which called for autonomy for Albanians in the Ottoman empire, but was eventually suppressed by the Turks. Verena and her co-author give it a very good write-up in the Bradt Guide, so I was disappointed to discover that it is closed on Mondays. To be honest, my time was short so it may be just as well – hopefully it is not the last time I will be in Prizren.

Note the large number of Albanian flags, which were not restricted to the museum complex but were flying all over Prizren, perhaps in the run-up to Albanian Flag Day which was three days later. There were a few Turkish flags as well – Prizren has a 5% Turkish minority and it is one of the official languages of the municipality.

After the museum, the big draw is the Sinan Pasha Mosque, which looked lovely outside and pretty good inside as well.

Prizren is a centre of activity for several Dervish orders; I looked into the courtyard of a tekke, and noted the fresh water flowing through it (there is a lot of fresh water in Prizren), and the neatly placed shoes of the dervishes by the building on the left, but I didn’t go in.

There is some interesting more modern public art as well; I didn’t get the title of this piece but the juxtaposition with the minaret of the Arasta Mosque tickled my fancy. (There are some much less interesting statues of fallen heroes on the other side of the square.)

More ephemerally, the Christmas decorations were going up in the Shadervan, the main square (in a city that is 96% Muslim these days). The bar on the corner on the left is called the Gatsby, and across the street is the Hemingway.

Brian Aldiss wrote after his visit sixty years ago,

It is not by the isolated monuments but the effect of the town as a whole that one remembers Prizren. Open gateways give glimpses into those jealously guarded Turkish walled gardens, most of which still look pleasant and inviting. This fact, and the sweet smell of the town, are owed to the abundant water supply. One of the most pleasant features of Jugoslavia generally is the number of wells and springs and waterfalls and rivers with which it abounds. In Prizren there is a lovely little spring in the Maraš Gardens, close by a massive and prehistoric-looking tree.

The tree and the spring are still there.

The light was almost gone by now, however, and I took the highway home, reaching the Hertz office just before it closed at 6pm. I know where to go next time.

NB: This post is not in any way meant to be a guide to the situation in Kosovo, which I have written a great deal about in other places and at other times; it is a record of a road trip that I took in 2006, with a few reflections based on my previous experiences and stealing from Brian Aldiss’s 1965 books, Cities and Stones.

I was in Kosovo last week, for the first time in ages – probably my dozenth visit overall, but only my third since independence in 2008. I had the idea that I could do some then-and-now photographs showing how much things had changed since my early visits – I first went in 2000, the year after the war – but didn’t manage (and haven’t yet managed) to dig those pre-digital era photos out of the attic.

However I did find something else in my archives, photos from a trip to Kosovo in early 2006, two years before independence while it was still under UN rule, with the captions that I had posted to a Livejournal gallery intending to write a blog post which I never got around to. So, better late than never, here’s the gallery of my visit to Kosovo almost 19 years ago, with my original captions and commentary from today. My photos from last week’s visit will follow.

It looks like I must have flown into Prishtina and then driven to Macedonia for some reason – the main road was closed so we crossed the border via a mountain track. It was not actually snowing, but it took forever. On the way back north we just went the long way round through Tetovo, which was much safer.

I am trying to work out which track this could have been. The online maps show an alternate route across the border from Viti to Brodets, and the satellite pictures of the crossing point at 42.225384, 21.371863 look similar to the photos above. But who knows?

I haven’t recorded whether the memorial to Aqim Selmani below was on the mountain road or seen on the other route the next day, but the latter is more likely, as much more of the fighting in 2001 was in the Tetovo area and the terrain looks less challenging. I found a clearer picture of the memorial on Facebook which shows his dates of birth and death as 4 April 1964 and 5 August 2001. Another source gives the date of his death as 5 August rather than 6 August. I have not found specific reference to the incident in which he was killed anywhere. The peace agreement that would end the conflict was on the verge of being signed over that August weekend in 2001, and the fighting was over only a couple of days later.

The next day, we headed over to the west of Kosovo, and specifically to the Visoki Dečani Monastery. While I captioned the next picture as showing Montenegro, a check of the map suggests that the mountainsides visible here are on the Kosovo side of the border, though the frontier does run along the top of the range; but more crucially, it’s the border with Albania not Montenegro.

The Visoki Dečani Monastery is one of the most important places for the Serbian Orthodox Shurch, and protection of its heritage was one of the sticking points in negotiation around the future status of Kosovo. I don’t remember if there were extra security checkpoints on the way in, and we probably would not have been allowed to take photos as they were. Perched in a steep-sided valley, it’s rather charming. Brian Aldiss wrote:

Of all the churches in Jugoslavia, Dečani seens the most lovely. Certainly it is the richest, and the air of serenity with which it stays among its surrounding dormitories, halls and orchards is impressive. Dečani looks eternal. It is a century older than Magdalen College, Oxford, two centuries older than Magdalene College, Cambridge, and was built when the medieval Serbian state was prospering… I wanted to stay near Dečani and visit it every day.

In 2006, the charm was offset by the tension over its future in a potentially independent Kosovo; which of course is why I was there.

A much younger me with Sava Janjić, who is the best known personality in the monastery. He became the abbot in 2011, five years after we met.

A couple of photos of iconography in Prishtina, first Ramush Haradinaj being the KLA leader and prime minister who had surrendered to the international war crimes tribunal in The Hague a year before (he was acquitted twice, and returned as PM in 2017-2020); and then Ibrahim Rugova, leader of Kosova before the conflict and president after, who had died just a few weeks before my 2006 visit – I also went to pay my respects at his grave, but we did not take photos there.

Finally we went to the battlefield where it all began, the Gazimestan where Slobodan Milošević gave his infamous 1989 speech which blew the starting whistle for the subsequent conflicts. I haven’t been in touch with my former colleague S for years, but I saw A in Kosovo last weekend where he entertained me for dinner with his wife and daughters (born some time after 2006), and M passes through Brussels frequently.

It’s OK to take pictures of the flags, just not of the military installations.

2024 pictures coming soon.