Sadly I'm writing this entry too long after the fact, and I doubt it will really do justice to our time in Kosovo. Our experiences there were a series of wild swings and extremes, but were almost uniformly positive and were unquestionably memorable.
We started our visit with a bus trip from Tirana to Peje in Kosovo's far northwest. And right from the moment of our arrival it was clear we were an interesting place. We walked down Avenue Bill Klinton, past billboards welcoming (US) congressman Eliot Engel to the city and would later run into streets named after Wesley Clark and Madeline Albright, statues of Bill Clinton and clothing shops named after his wife Hillary. Clearly Kosovo has not forgotten the diplomatic and military lengths that the US went to to assure their independence (even if it's very unlikely that they would do the same today).
Following this walk we were met by our host at the Safari Hostel. I still don't know quite what to make of our experience there. The place was clean, and although it was really just an apartment with sofa beds in the lounge-kitchen area, our room was comfy enough and had a balcony with a nice view up into the mountains to boot. But he was friendly to the point of being overbearing, and encouraged guests to leave positive reviews to the point of badgering, peering over their shoulders and insisting they finish writing before leaving. When I left an 8-point-something review (after departing), we got twenty one (un-replied-to) WhatsApp messages berating us, complaining, calling us dishonest, and eventually concluding that the review couldn't have been left by us because we were such nice people.
Other than wandering around and drinking coffees and beers by the river (mercifully, although trade ties are very tight and Kosovo imports tons of goods from Albania, it has its own breweries, far superior to the big Albanian ones) we had two major activities in Peje.
The first was to visit the gorgeous Patriarchate of Pecs, a nunnery just outside of town that, at least in theory, was still the seat of the Serbian Orthodox Church. The church within the walled grounds was pretty from the outside, and covered floor to ceiling by even more beautiful fifteenth century frescoes inside. And the nuns showed us to the gift shop and sold us a bottle of their homemade plum rakia, seven years old and by a wide margin the best we drank (as part of a picnic just outside the nunnery grounds) anywhere in the Balkans.
The other main activity was a visit to the weekly Sunday cheese market. In fact we'd planned our final days in Albania and our whole time in Kosovo around it (hardly a surprise, for those who know Sarah). We weren't entirely sure where it was, but found it by first heading to the bazaar, then following the crowds and finally following our noses. And while it maybe wasn't quite as big as we'd expected, it was inarguably authentic, with fifteen or so merchants selling their multiple varieties of fermented curd out of big wooden casks, and happy shoppers carting away their kilos for the week. A friendly cheese-seller invited Sarah to try all three of his white, salty, varyingly funky products and we walked away with half a kilo of the good stuff (about as small a purchase as one could make there).
From Peje we headed south towards the city of Prizren. On the way we stopped at the very memorable Decan Monastery.
None of the institutions of the Serbian Orthodox Church (or indeed, ethnic Serbs themselves) are welcome in Kosovo. And while the Patriarchate was guarded only by a small Kosovo police post, on the thirty minute walk to the Decan Monastery we passed two fortified checkpoints of KFOR, the remaining NATO force in Kosovo, and had to surrender our passports to the Italian troops at one of them I. order to receive a visitor badge and be checked into the monastery as visitors.
But my, wasn't it worth it! The church and it's frescoes were even bigger and more beautiful than the ones at the Patriarchate. And we were squires around by an English speaking volunteer (lay) guide who told us all about the history of the place. And during our visit one of the monks invited us up to the terrace dining area overlooking the church to enjoy a coffee and some of their homemade lemonade and rakia. We sat enjoying the blissfully sunny afternoon, the peaceful environment and a further long chat with our guide Stephen until a couple more English speaking tourists arrived and he headed off to show them around.
As at the patriarchate, there was a monastery shop, where we purchased a beer (made at a different monastery) and some cheese (made at the Decan) for another lovely picnic.
Our final stop in Kosovo was the charming town of Prizren. Despite being about halfway across the country from Peje, in little Kosovo this means that it's only 60km as the crow flies and a couple of hours by bus.
Prizren's historical and religious architecture survived the communist era and the independence war almost intact (except for the old Serbian neighbourhood, which was burned to the ground, showing once again that in the Balkan wars there are no such thing as "good guys").
This makes the city pretty and pleasant. To tell the truth, if you've been to Sarajevo or Istanbul, it's actually fairly unremarkable. But the fact that the city centre is brimming with restaurants and cafes, and that it was the time of year when many of the Kosovar diaspora return home for a visit and holiday with their families in and around Prizren, made it the kind of place you want to spend more time than you'd planned.
We went to an outdoor screening of a Yugoslav era romantic comedy movie about a Serbian woman hired to be a waitress in an ethnically Albanian town in (what is now) southern Montenegro. We went for a walk along the river. And drank lots of coffee and ate lots of watermelon. And went on a pub crawl with our hostel-mates where we got a tour of a seventy year old movie theater (including the projection room and a hilariously interesting collection of 1960s to 1980s posters for foreign movies). We got to try exotic varieties of Rakia (walnut=great, sweet cherry=less good). And even tried a few local beers (the stuff from a tiny nanobrewery run by some of the tiny ethnic Serb minority was clearly the best beer we had in the southern Balkans).
All of this was so nice that we decided to extend our stay in Prizren from one or two to three days, and skip over Kosovo's capital, Pristina and head due south to our final Balkan destination, the Republic of Macedonia.
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