PART 1 (KOSOVO)

In order to avoid hurting anyone's feelings in the Kosovo section of the travelogue, I shall use names in both languages (Serbian and Albanian), using slashes, except for situations where the context refers to a specific site clearly belonging to one of the sides (e.g. Decani Monastery, Pecka Patrijarsija). Concerning the territory itself, I shall use the internationally accepted term (Kosovo). In order to ease the reading, I have chosen not to use any specific diacritics, either Serbian or Albanian, restricting the text to the basic Latin font encoding. I mention that all pictures were shot during the same trip (December 20-22, 2004).

THE JOURNEY

The schedule was very tight: I was supposed to leave Bucharest on December 19, go to Kosovo via Belgrade, then on to Albania, cross into Greece and take the train back to Bucharest and somehow reach Rodna Mountains on December 28, as I was supposed to meet some friends and go hiking along the ridge until the dawn of next year. So, after pondering on various options, after receiving an old but very comprehensive (from a historical point of view at least) guide on Albania and nevertheless after buying two maps, one of Greece and one of Croatia in order to have half Albania on one, respectively the other half on the other one (as it was, "of course", impossible to get a map of Albania), I started.

Now, that Serbs needed a visa for Romania and vice versa, the train was half full from Bucharest to Timișoara and totally empty from Timișoara to Belgrade, except for a few smugglers carrying more merchandise than usual to make it for their colleagues' missing. Apart from the smugglers on the seats wagons and me, there were only three other passengers on the sleeper. It felt strange going to Kosovo in the 21st century. There were many things, many questions bumping in my head, as well as a thick layer of subjectiveness, as much as I had tried to avoid it. The train was crossing Serbian Banat and it was now pulled by a diesel engine, as the railway was not electrified from Vrsac to Pancevo. Looking off the window through the steam generated by the wagon heating system, I was thinking of the days to come, of the few travelogues and short stories I had read, written by a few people recently crossing Kosovo. "People experienced in Kosovo advise not to attempt to speak Serbian or Albanian - if you use the wrong language in the wrong place results may not be pleasant" read a travelogue. Then what is the correct calling, is it Pec or Peja? I don't know whether the one violently attacking the other or the one violently defending is more guilty, as they both produce victims. Maybe they are both just as guilty. I don't think that a crusade was more righteous than an Ottoman invasion; no faith, habit, lifestyle, rule in this world has the right to kill in order to promote itself. And, more than anything else, nobody has the right to trash history and to deny it in his / her own interest. But, even in the 21st century, life still seems to be a matter of kill or get killed, just as it was in the times of Vlad the Impaler we all conveniently but nevertheless pathetically mock at nowadays.

The steam slowly vanished and the sun shone up in the sky: a beautiful, snowless December day was welcoming those few lost passengers getting to Belgrade. A bit later on, I met two American internet friends, Peter and Paul. Without finding a Mary to complete the band, we decided to go on together into the "adventure", as Paul called it; I would not use such a commercial term. My image on Kosovo was rather scattered and, while reading about UNESCO sites, I had discovered a monastery which had been added on the World Heritage List a few months ago: the monastery of Decani. So, a good friend from Belgrade, Bojan, was kind enough to call the monks there and ask them whether we could visit the monastery because, being Serbian, it was more like an enclave and it was defended by an Italian KFOR military unit. We received the blessing from Fra Teodosije and we could therefore go.

We got tickets for Pristina / Prishtine on a night bus and we started after wandering around Belgrade for a while. When the bus got to the platform, everyone was waiting, people rushed to the door and nobody respected the seat he / she had been assigned. There was a heterogenous bunch of people. Christian, muslim, old and young, citizens of a Serbia Kosovo was (theoretically at least) still part of. Eventually everything calmed down and a sad silence lay down among the passengers. The bus started and we kept on following the highway for a while. They had a film on the bus TV set, one about some war, which seemed to be in black and white even though it had been obviously shot in colours. Once it got to the end (I don't think they even let it go until the end), it would start again. Dialogues were rather few and even then full of interjections and shouts, while there were plenty of fights and deaths. In a way, both the communication refusal and the colourless fight fitted the situation in a cruel, but true way.

A few hours later it stopped for a break near a restaurant called Tito, a place where they collected a wide variety of small scale busts, inlays, pictures and images depicting the former leader of the Second Yugoslavia. We started and the war movie started over once more, just to be stopped for good when the the driver pulled the bus to the right for the documents checking on a state border that theoretically does not exist. The bus was crossing some wooden mountains that reminded me of a similar (if this is the right word) between Zagreb and Sarajevo. We were half asleep when we crossed Pristina / Prishtine and the idea of getting off the bus and meeting a quite thick layer of snow, as well as a few hours of night to come until dawn, was no longer great; we therefore remained on the bus continuing to Prizren / Prizreni, where we got at about 5 AM, after leaving Belgrade at 9:30 PM. As it was still dark, we went into a bar in the bus station and asked for a coffee, getting used to the sounds of the Albanian language: it was true that it employed some Turkish words and that - probably through Vlach - its vocabulary also used a few words similar to Romanian, but otherwise it was totally different from the languages I had encountered so far. The two young men managing the little bar were very nice and hospitable, they were also very curious about us. After they gave us some directions and after dawn, we left some of Peter and Paul's heavy luggage there went to the city.

The military presence was not so visible in the street. In front of the OSCE mission, hosted by a large building, there were a few large off-road vehicles, all in the parking lot and all with the engines and lights turned on, even though 1. it was daylight and 2. nobody was in or around them. About three hours later, when returning towards the bus station, we were to find them in the same position and in the same state. We stood there for a few seconds wondering who was paying for the fuel and looked one at the other one, smiling like in some cheap movie. Then we moved on, preferring the city to its careless intruders. Prizren / Prizreni had a beautiful area of old, Turkish-style houses with small shops, many cafes, trendy bars and restaurants, a picturesque area which will probably attract many tourists once war images are wiped off the public eye. Further up the valley from the Ottoman stone bridge that reminded me, in a way, of Andric's novel, I could see the former Serbian quarter of the city. Most of the houses had been destroyed, burnt down, or partly demolished, while the remaining walls were smoked, being surrounded by barbed wire, rubbish and a thick layer of snow. We went up the hill, reaching the fortress from where one could have a great view over the city itself. The scenery was very nice, including some wooden mountains to the back, and Prizren / Prizreni with its old town dotted from place to place with impeccably white mosques. However, the closer one looked, the more impossible it got to avoid seeing the destroyed, with roofless churches no longer having windows or doors. We went down and, after passing by a large hammam with its massive and well preserved building, we went strolling across the old town, eventually reaching the bus station.

They had buses going to most important cities in Kosovo, and they were pretty frequent: after we sadly saw a bus to Pristina / Prishtine leaving as we were just entering the bus station site, we noticed there was another one 20 minutes later on. We got on the bus and it started. The scenery was anything bus monotonous, with round, forested mountain slopes bordered by wide valleys which hosted smaller or larger communities. The general atmosphere was quite Oriental, with many merchants selling their stuff right by the road, with the main street being often bordered by those lovely tiny shops where one could find everything, from Christmas lights, to oranges, packs of cigarettes, detergent or clothes. The currency used in most places, was exclusively the Euro; the Dinar, we were to find out, was only accepted in Serbian enclaves, such as monasteries and Serbian villages.

At about 1 PM we reached Pristina / Prishtine, a massive city which impressed the eye with its sudden appearance of tall, massive concrete blocks of flats painted in different colours. We went by foot from the bus station to the landmark which seemed to be created by a large, grey and ugly hotel, the Grand; I could never imagine how the 5* could proudly stand up there. Near the library with its interesting architecture and cobweb-like window frames, there was a new Orthodox church being built, even though it seemed that works had stopped a while ago. Traffic was chaotic, cars were parked everywhere there was a tiny spot, there were people selling clothes, pirate CDs, fruits, pastry, second hand mobile phones, Christmas decorations, greeting cards, petards and so on, filling the sidewalk, while pedestrians were sneaking around them, around cars, monuments, fences, buildings and, seemingly, around Pristina / Prishtine itself. This atmosphere was very intense, very vivid, I can say that I fully enjoyed it. We went to see the old quarter, visiting two mosques and an old but very well restored konak nowadays belonging to the Faculty of Science and Arts of Pristina / Prishtine. We continued walking up the street crossing the old town and slowly traffic got lighter, as we were getting close to the city limits. At a certain moment, to the left, we saw a church. Walking up a narrow street, we reached it. The church had been burnt down, there was no roof, while the main cupola still stood lonely in the middle of the naos, with a chain bouncing and reminding one of some hanging rope. The chandelier which had once lit the church nowadays lay in a corner, smashed and partly covered in rubbish. The frescoes on the (once) interior walls were exposed to rain, snow and winds. Wherever one stepped, there was a creaking produced by pieces of windows, wood, tiles and plaster under the seemingly flat snow layer that covered the marble floor where the faithful had once prayed God for his mercy. We left the site and went back to the city centre, with its noise and thirst for life. Reaching the bus station, we got a bus to Decani / Dechan Village, our next destination.

The bus went across central Kosovo, passing by Kosovo Polje and all its 6 centuries of history, then it went on passing through towns and villages. Individuals and shopkeepers were selling their merchandise on improvised stalls, directly on the pavement, in the street, on the sidewalk, as well as in the mud that was supposed to be the sidewalk and the street altogether. Eventually we reached the village of Decani / Decan and, after asking around, we started towards the monastery. However, as it was dark, we missed the right street. There were a few young men I started to talk to in an improvised Italian, as they were ethnic Albanians working in Italy and speaking no other language but the two. They showed us the way and eventually they also gave us a ride there, actually not all the way there, which was technically impossible, but rather only to the Italian KFOR unit defending the entrance on the monastery territory. Large concrete fences covered in barbed wire, a barrier, a KFOR kiosk and a handful of otherwise friendly Italian soldiers, this is how the entrance to a monastery looks in Kosovo. It felt, in a unique and nevertheless strange way, similar to the monasteries in Southern Bukovina, which stood for fortresses at wartime and for religious settlements at peacetime. The Italian soldiers called Fra Teodosije Bojan had talked to and, after his confirmation that we were who we had claimed to be, we handed our passports to the soldiers and were given a ride on an army truck to the monastery gate, then a soldier led us to the premises and told us that we could collect our passports when leaving the monastery the following day.

The church was stunningly beautiful, with its white stone carved walls shining in the moonlight. Gothic elements met the Byzantine structure in a unique, harmonious way, making one believe that the KFOR troops outside stood for the mere security system needed to protect a precious jewel in a fine museum of some cosmopolitan capital city of the same Europe we were in right then. We went inside and, after waiting for the mass to be over, we were invited for dinner. A meal which was more than pure food, looking like a Bruegelian painting rich in pastel colours. We had a very interesting discussion with a monk over historical, cultural and, eventually, political matters (well, we were in the Balkans after all). It was very interesting to find out that in the 21st century a monastery can be attacked with grenades, as Decani Monastery had been attacked in March 2004. However, in a strange and sinister way, one could not but realize that this was only a continuation of a history full of attacks, defeats, assaults, fights, developments, ethnic changes, people movement and uprisings Kosovo still was about. We were eventually shown to a room overlooking the monastery church. The following morning we visited the church: its structure, volumes and frescoes were absolutely stunning. It was not merely beautiful, it was simply overwhelming, showing in a best way the ephemeral nature of the mortal. After breakfast, we left Decani Monastery and, once getting to Pec / Peja by bus, we started exploring the city.

The bazaar street covered in gravel was possibly the best and most vivid of the ones I saw in Kosovo, even though I am not referring here to the fanciness and the beautiful buildings of Istanbul or else. Just in the middle of the bazaar there was a recently refurbished mosque with fine decorations by the entrance. We walked up the local stream, going out of the city on the way towards Berane, Montenegro. Just after exiting the city, a big board read in large fonts: "this is the last KFOR base" with an apocalyptic touch, as if the world was just a flat plate and those stepping any further would fall over the verge, in a the bottomless abyss of dark and freezing nothingness. We went to the checkpoint, once again left the passports with the Italian soldiers and we were shown to the entrance of the Pecka Patrijarsija. The small park around which the monastic buildings had been set stunned one more than the church itself. Beyond anything else, it was quiet, there was a silence telling more than anything else about the place, silence which was only rarely broken by some echo coming from the Italians moving around their tanks and cannons across the steep walls. Going back to the bus station after eating something, we got a bus to Tirana at 6:30 PM. I was leaving Kosovo without having any clear image about it as a whole, leaving the dark night surrounding me wipe out my thoughts and concerns. There was no Kosovo and no Kosova, there were only people, as subjective as I or any other travelers definitely were.

We reached the Albanian border checkpoint and the officer there asked us if we needed a visa... (click here for the sequel)

THE KOSOVO SECTION (you are here)

THE ALBANIAN SECTION