Halfway down the Danube: Pristina

November 15, 2005

Pristina

So I'm in Pristina, in Kosovo.

This is my first time in Kosovo. I came with mixed feelings. On one hand, I hadn't heard much good about the province. "A dump" was the most typical comment. On the other hand, I had been pleasantly surprised by Tirana, in Albania. And... I was curious to see what the fuss was all about.

Brief first impressions:

-- The airport, like every other airport in the former YU, is miles and miles from the city. I can see that in Belgrade, but why did they do that for modest-sized towns like Pristina and Skopje?

-- Thick chilly fog, scented with coal smoke. That bitter brown coal smell.

-- Bad roads. Balkan drivers. An Orthodox Church, empty, behind barbed wire, with weeds growing high around it.

-- Ugly buildings, just like everyone said. Bad '70s and '80s architecture, lots of Communist block apartments interspersed with the occasional flight of fancy. There's a building topped with Fuller domes. It doesn't look nearly as cool as someone obviously thought it would.

-- Cigarette sellers everywhere. In Tirana, they're kids. Here they're young men. Walk down the street, and you'll pass a dozen of them in five minutes. I sat in a restaurant for an hour, and at least seven or eight of them came through.

-- Burek shops. Romania is out of the burek zone, but Pristina is right in the middle of it. The Balkan fast food trinity: burek, pizza, doner kebabs.

-- Cafes. Romania doesn't really have the full-blown Balkan cafe culture. Pristina does. It's like Belgrade. There must be a hundred of them downtown. More.

-- Crumbling sidewalks. A lot of deferred maintenance. The people are, on average, a bit more shabbily dressed than your average Belgrader. But only a bit. Could be a poorish town in south Serbia.

-- Kosovo is still administered by the UN. The UN vehicle of choice is the white Land Rover, and the damn things are everywhere.

-- Holy cow, do these people love Americans. But that probably deserves a post of its own.

I'm staying at the Hotel Grand. Back in the bad old days, this was the unofficial headquarters of the Serbian secret police. Arkan stayed here, with his tigers. Albanians wouldn't dare enter the place.

Today... well, it's just another run-down former Communist hotel. Chilly rooms, threadbare towels, toilets that run. Ugly abstract sculpture from the '70s. There's wireless in the lobby, so there are always clusters of people sitting there, gathered around laptops, drinking Turkish coffee and espresso, smoking, smoking. It feels like someplace that's waiting for what comes next.

Which, in this particular case, is privatization. It goes on the block next year. 300 rooms, centrally located, great fixer-upper. Be the newest hotelier in Europe's newest country! Apply now!

More in a bit.

Posted by douglas at November 15, 2005 10:34 PM

Comments

I have a more general question. Does Kosovo seem like it's going to keep its quasi-colony status indefinitely?

Posted by: Andrew Reeves at November 17, 2005 08:41 PM

Tell us more! What exactly are you doing there?

Oh, and Doug, could you email me at my work address? I seem to have lost your contact.

Posted by: Noel at November 17, 2005 11:18 PM

I'm definitly interested and would love to hear more about your experiences there.

Cheers,
Mike

Posted by: Mike Ralls at November 17, 2005 11:40 PM

Interesting note on Pristina. My experience is that capital/large cities get more and more alike. The cultural elites in Europe (and the world for that matter) share, at least superficially, the same global culture. So cities are usually not very good reflections of the countries they're in. Usually the countryside is where you'll find the true character of the country. London, Washington DC, Shanghai, Jakarta and Moscow are not good example of their respective countries. Probably the same is true of Pristina/Kosovo.

Did you have any chance to venture outside the city? Something else which I've been curious about but have not been able to find an answer to is - are there regional differences within Kosovo (cultural, economic, linguistic, etc.)?

Posted by: Oskar L. at November 27, 2005 08:45 PM

Andrew, Kosovo will lose it's quasi-colony status fairly soon. Negotiations over "status" -- a nice way to say independence -- began last week. They'll probably continue into the back half of next year, but by 2007 Kosovo will be en route to full independence.

Oskar, yes, there are regional differences in Kosovo -- not so much linguistic (they're all speaking northern or Gheg-dialect Albanian) as social, economic and cultural.

To simplify, up until the 1950s it was a rural backwater, with no industry and no large towns. Tito brought mass education and forced industrialization and created, well, a class society. By 1990, there were several large towns and one small city, and urban elites that were very similar to urban elites elsewhere in Yugoslavia. A judge, an accountant or a manager in Prizren or Pristina was more like a judge/accountant/manager in Belgrade than like the peasants out in the plains... never mind the folks up in the mountains.

Of course, these elites were maybe 10% of the population.

Anyway: one distinct region in Kosovo is Devnice, which is sort of the central-western portion of the Great Plain of Kosovo, west and south of Pristina. This area is rural, culturally conservative, and produced a disproportionate number of KLA fighters.

The towns also have distinct personalities. Pristina, the capital, was always the educational, political and economic hub, and relatively liberal; today it's a boom town, having grown from ~250,000 before the war to more like ~600,000 today. Prizren was an Ottoman market town and preserves the most Ottoman flavor of anywhere in the province; it's still considered the cultural center of Kosovo, and Prizreners look down on the sharp-elbowed arrivistes in Pristina.

In the '90s, both Prizren and Pristina clung for years to the (ultimately futile) pacifist program of Ibrahim Rugova. Gjakova, in the far west, under the shadow of the Accursed Mountains, did not. Gjakova is a hard-bitten Communist industrial town with a well-deserved reputation for radicalism and political violence. Gjakovans were the urban equivalent of the Devnicers, Detroit to their Alabama if you like, producing another bumper crop of KLA fighters.

So, the short answer is, yes. There's a lot of variety. Kosovo is pretty teensy -- it's a square about 100 km or 60 miles on a side, a bit smaller than Connecticut -- but it's fractally complex.

It still doesn't make a lot of sense as an independent country, but that's another story.

Doug M.

Posted by: Doug M. at November 27, 2005 09:42 PM

Doug,

Thank's for the review of the regional differences in Kosovo. It was all news to me and very interesting.

You write that Kosovo "doesn't make a lot of sense as an independent country." What's your opnion on this very charged issue?

I'm not a big fan of how things turned out, but now that it's a fact I'm all for giving (most of) Kosovo independence and moving on.

Let Serbia keep some northern slice of it and let the EU/US/World Bank pay for the resettlement of the serbs in the 'wrong' parts of Kosovo. Maybe the EU could promise accession talks as an extra incentive. Finally letting go of Kosovo should help Serbia becoming a more 'normal' (ie monoethnic) state.

From the international community's perspective, this way they wouldn't have to spend treasure, troops and political effort in the doomed effort of turning Kosovo into a multiethnic state with strong minority rights. Maybe they could even move some of the most important orthodox monasteries and churches to Serbia (stone by stone, in the long run probably a lot cheaper than guarding them).

For the Kosovo Albanians, full independence for (most of) Kosovo would make them the responsible for their own future within clearly defined borders.