It has hardly been peace and stability since then either but after having declared independance in 2008 (not universally acknowledged) things finally look like they are improving. Relations with Serbia are still bad (in fact the Serbians have recently barricaded the border forcing me to re-evaluate my route) but there is a real hospitality extended to Western Europeans and Americans for their aid. Pristina even has a "Bulevardi Bil Klinton".
On crossing the border, I was greeted my a man in a hard hat and fluorescent jacket who asked me if I was going to Prison. "Prison?" I asked, "I was just planning on going to Pristina". After a bit of language unravelling, I realised he was asking for a lift to "Prizren" and he jumped in the passenger seat. Tony, who was working on a new road near the border explained a lot about how he had signed up to fight the Serbian invasion, how the Kosovans felt now, how the country was changing, and how they feel indebted to the people who brought them aid and peace. It was facinating stuff and I spent about an hour just asking him questions until he reached home (or got fed up and pretended to be home).
I drove on through the countryside until reaching the capital and booked into the Velania Guesthouse, a nice little place run by a mad old professor. Wandering through the sandy narrow alleyways brings you out at the city centre which is a mix of fairly new buildings and really new buildings like the city just shot up overnight without any identity or town-planning involved. Get out of the centre though and you begin to see more signs of delapidated buildings and occational bullet holes, a sign of how recently the place was still a warzone. As if another reminder was needed, there is a long fence through the city's main street which is still plastered with pictures and names of missing people whose families have not given up on finding them yet.
Right in the centre of town is one of the strangest buildings I have ever seen, the National Library, which looks like a primary school project made from shoe boxes, chicken wire and ping-pong balls. Just north of here, if you wander through the park, is a familiar sight - a copy of the statue of Skenderbeg from Tirana, goat horns and all (Kosovo's population is now around 90% Albanian and the Albanian and Kosovan flags are nearly always seen flying side by side).Outside the shopping centre you will also find a sign of Kosovo's pride at independance, the big "Newborn" letter which have already been defaced with grafiti. Keep heading north and the road brings you to the more Turkish area of town. Here you can't miss the numerous big mosques and sprawling bazaar-style markets.
If there are two things to visit in Pristina though, they are the Kosovo Museum and the Kosovo Art Gallery - both of which have strong ties to the war with Serbia. The museum has a lot of archeological finds from the region, including loads of little stone and teracotta figues, but the emphesis is on the empty display boxes and posters telling the story of how the majority of the exhibits have been (alledgedly) stolen by the Serbian museum in Belgrade.
The upstairs of the museum is dedicated to the recent war with plenty of guns, bomb parts, newspaper headlines, grueling photographs and a smug portrait of Tony Blair. In the basement is a little gallery with the work of local artist Lendita Zeqiraj.
The Kosovo Art Gallery is currently showing one of the most moving exhibitions I have seen, the Bogujevci family's "Visual History". In 1999, the Bogujevci and Duriqi families were murdered in their local village of Podujeva by a Serbian military unit called "The Scorpians" (the same one which killed 8000 Muslims in 1995, not the rock band). In total 19 people were lined up and shot but somehow, 5 children survived between the ages of 6 and 13 with over 30 bullet wounds between them. The exhibition uses a lot of video footage and photographs to show the children's recovery in the UK and their subsequent fight to hunt down and bring the perpetrators to justice - a process which is still ongoing.
I came to Kosovo expecting the people to be keen to move on from the war which ravaged their country but it is still plastered everywhere you look and the people are still eager to explain their side of the story. As I drove on to Montenegro, I figured that this new country which is still caught up between Albania and Serbia may need to move away from it's past to build a new future.
Last views of Kosovo before heading into Montenegro
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