I Never Really Left: Seeing the future in Kosovo
My first view into Kosovo came at the wrong end of more than seven hours of trundling, sweaty, noisy, cramped coach journey through the nonetheless beautiful Durmitor national park in northern Montenegro. I was grumpy, agitated from a slightly-too-tense border crossing, and desperate for a shower, a pee, and, above all, the tallest and coldest beer the ancient city of Prizren could offer. At that moment, the prospect of exploring an unexplored city was not my main concern so much as the prospect of moving my legs further than the overhanging buttock of the Albanian builder who reclined himself firmly into my groin about three minutes after departing Podgorica. Yet as the last of the Montenegrin mountains peeled back like a theatre curtain, out before us spread Kosovo — Europe’s most impoverished, war-torn, troubled, beautiful, warm, awe-inspiring nation. The road swept round the breast of the hill and revealed a landscape of greens and taupes, valleys and peaks, villages, farms, minarets, beckoning us in. The blood returned to my legs, and the adrenaline found when anticipating the exploration of the unexplored, flooded in abundance.
Prizren, as with Kosovo as a whole, was an unknown quantity known only from hazy recollections of news headlines and gloomy reports from a flack-jacketed Lyse Doucet or John Simpson. Such is the view of Kosovo for most of the outside world, save for the well under 200,000 annual tourists and their unsuspecting friends and relatives (and article readers), who will be party to what is truly, to use proper Thomas Cook parlance, Europe’s best-kept secret. By the way, to contextualise how trifling a figure their 170,000-odd tourists is, neighbouring Montenegro hosted over 2.6 million international tourists in the year to 2020. Italy had over 420 million.
Prizren is Kosovo’s most unspoiled city. All noise and chaos, Prizren is alive with children playing in the river, muezzins calling to their faithful masses, corn-on-the-cob vendors plying their trade, poorly-tuned Ladas that appear more dent than car whizzing into parking spaces approximately half an inch longer than its length. We were there in August and, perhaps predictably, it was capital-H Hot; gone 10 p.m., temperatures were still pushing the mercury to approaching 30. In amongst the pandemonium nestles Old Town Prizren. An Ottoman tapestry of roughly-hewn cobbled streets no wider than my armspan, all the thoroughfares are flanked with very old Turkish-style houses, the whitewash peeling endearingly, as though mocking our British sunburn. Every window reveals a slice of Kosovar life: gentlemen playing drafts and smoking heavily, women with wizened faces and neatly-tied headscarves scrubbing linen, children staring impishly at our, slightly ungainly, backpacked silhouettes. Picking through the serpentine streets eventually led us to the fine central mosque, whose long, spindly minarets deftly pierce the terracotta skyline. Kosovo is split into two; the northern plains, and the mountainous south, defined by the Sharr range. Prizren is attractively nestled by mountains on three sides, giving the effect of a giant’s amphitheatre, with Prizren its stage. I feel this is true in more than a geographical sense. Prizren features all the world in minature. It’s one of Kosovo’s richer areas (though by European standards this isn’t saying much), so there are as many huge drug-dealer style BMWs and Mercedes with tinted windows as there are buzzing Wartburgs and Yugos. Growing wealth inequality seems to be defining this era of Kosovo’s development, with big money earned abroad slowly returning to the motherland. It looks strange, perhaps even vulgar, to an outsider, but the idea of prosperity and self-sufficiency is naturally alluring to a country that has suffered so much in abject poverty for so long.
Despite the rise of McMansion-style weath, in my opinion there are very few places I’ve been that feel so singular, so intensely themselves, as Kosovo. “There’s a Kosovar doing his shopping,” I found myself thinking, “and there’s one clearing out his drain.” This sounds strange, but I also don’t think I’ve ever met a Kosovar person outside of Kosovo, so something about walking amongst a whole group of them felt somehow novel. Of course, some big names have come from this tiny nation: Rita Ora and Dua Lipa are both very proud of their Kosovar roots, and so too are the Kosovans proud of them. Questions about their stardom outside of Kosovo was invariably the first topic of conversation with everyone we spoke to, along with several footballers whose names I have forgotten, and frankly don’t care enough about to look up.
I did eventually find my biggest, coldest beer I so craved on the coach. It was fine. It could have been freshly-chilled cat’s piss for all I cared at that point; it was cold and vaguely alcoholic, and that sufficed. Eating was not quite so simple — Kosovar cuisine is not for the faint of heart, or frankly, the vegetarian. This posed a problem, as my partner is a committed veggie, so much hunting was to be done. It also relies quite heavily on carp, a fish whose texture is that of soggy cotton wool balls, so I too was somewhat stymied. Eventually we settled on three small meals: first, and best, a byrek (or börek). About as integral to Balkan cuisine as herring is to Scandinavian, or half a ton of butter is to Swiss, byreks are filo pastry delights, variously triangular, sliced into oblongs or (most excitingly) Toulouse sausage-shaped, classically filled with spinach and sheep’s cheese, or an especially delicious pumpkin concoction. We naturally indulged in our fair share of byreks, but after a very long day’s travel, this still didn’t quite plug the hole (more like yawning chasm) in our appetite. So we found one of the cheeky corn-on-the-cob vendors, thinking there’s very little which could go wrong with humble sweetcorn. We were wrong. I still don’t know if there’s some special Kosovar way to eat their own cobs, but having attacked it from every possible angle without being able to remove so much as a kernel, we assumed they must be used as some sort of local construction tool, and set it aside. Finally, defeated, we engaged in something we had pretty much totally avoided the whole trip (save for token Fantas bought only to avail ourselves of free WiFi or the lavatory) — fast food. I know, I know, it’s not “authentic” and we are “supporting the western capitalist-imperialist invasion” or whatever, but desperate times call for deep-fried chicken. It was slightly weird experience, entering a well-lit, amply air-conditioned palace of fried goods amongst the much more rustic establishments surrounding it. I didn’t like it. It felt… uncomfortable. Not uncomfortable like eating a five-course meal at the Hilton International in Kampala, knowing that nobody outside its gilded doorknobs could dream of affording the same meal, but uncomfortable because it was unnecessary. We could’ve made do; we could’ve gone back for another byrek or three, but the allure of convenience overwhelmed us. It is the only fast-food outlet in Kosovo, and I really hope it stays that way. Just go easy on the carp.
There is an elephant in the room, though. A big, Serbian, tank-shaped, elephant. The war is something that has to be dealt with head-on, because it is still present, it is raw, as much in the memories of its inhabitants as in the buildings, still scarred with bullet-holes and mortar craters the size of a football. Kosovo lives with this reality, and is building its future on this foundation. It’s worth shedding some light first on what Kosovo has gone through. It’s the subject of many a grizzly report, so I won’t elucidate too much here (and I am far from an authority on the subject), but as Yugoslavia fell, the ethnic Albanians of Kosovo decided to go their own way like Croatia, Macedonia, and the others. Serbia, scarred from the losses of Bosnia, decided to cling on. In so doing, they forced hundreds of thousands of their supposed compatriots out of Kosovo into Albania and beyond. Ninety per cent of the population became refugees. Ninety per cent.
There was a gentleman we met in Prizren, one of the first people we spoke to in Kosovo. He was the man who owned our AirBnB. His English was flawless, so unsurprisingly I started running my mouth, and we got talking about his story. Around eighteen when he was forced to flea his nation, he ran across the border, alone, under cover of night. Miles from home, the chaos and panic caused the family to become separated. He was the only member of his family to survive the exodus. Clinging to the wheel-arch of a lorry, he travelled across Europe, arriving eventually on British shores. He spent many years homeless on the streets of London, learning English from hearing the conversations of strangers, and learning to play a guitar he found in a skip. Having eventually found lodgings on Baker Street, he started a career as a session musician, playing for the likes of Pink Floyd and Simply Red. From the sadistic grip of a ruthless warmonger, via a lorry’s wheelarch, to playing guitar for some of the world’s greatest bands.
“Why did you come back,” I asked him, “when you had such a life in London? Why would you come back to Kosovo after all that?”
“Kosovo is my home. I don’t think we ever really left,” he responded. I was awestruck. I still am.
What a people. What a country.
