Pristina: A City Break with a Twist

Bulevardi Bil Klinton

It is a strange yet powerful experience to visit a country that has been in existence barely a decade. Kosovo has been a nation state for only as long as I have been an adult.  Having visited its Balkan neighbours many times, I was keen to pay a visit and so I did, in August of last year.  Arriving in Pristina just as dawn broke, after a surreal, overcrowded night bus journey from Podgorica involving snatched, uncomfortable sleep and much shouting in Albanian at the border, only the straining of the engine betraying the landscape outside in the darkness, Kosovo’s capital seemed something of a ghost town as we wandered empty residential streets clutching a Google maps printout in search of our accommodation.

But after much needed sleep, we ventured into the city centre.  Unlike its neighbouring countries, the streets of Pristina were crowded with new and expensive cars bearing an assortment of international number plates.  The constant flow of traffic was punctuated by ubiquitous Balkan horn honking and, after the sweltering, oppressive heat of Montenegro, the temperature was a pleasant 25 degrees with a cooling breeze.  Bill Clinton greeted us cheerily from atop his plinth as we made our way up his titular Bulevardi.

More than any other Balkan capital, Pristina is an international city. It is a city unashamed in its gratitude to its American saviours – Bill Clinton has his boulevard, Madeleine Albright a square. The Stars and Stripes fly alongside the deliberately uncontentious Kosovar flag and US multinationals slap their brands across the city.  Nowhere was this more ironically obvious than the Coca Cola stall pumping out turbo folk and obscuring the much-photographed Newborn monument, updated with the golden digits 1 and 0 to mark Kosovo’s tenth birthday.  It is perhaps true that this monument, in all its chipped, graffitied glory, encapsulates everything that is conflicted about this tiny new nation.

Flags, as they so often do, play an important role in national identity here.  As visible as the gold and blue flag of Kosovo (colours and design chosen to offend no one), is the black and red of the Albanian flag. It functions almost as a de facto dual national flag and signifies the controversial history of this small country that was so quickly taken to the heart of an international community anxious not to screw up another Balkan war so soon after Bosnia.  Uniformed soldiers, wearing the patches of their home countries on their sleeves, stroll the streets as another reminder that all is not so rosy beneath the surface.

Kosovo's National Library (with abandoned church in background)

An enormous, ostentatious Orthodox church newly erected in the centre of Pristina seems to be the ethnic elephant in the religious room, since no one appears keen to discuss their Serbian neighbours.  A more accurate metaphor might be the derelict church beside the mesmerisingly striking national library, where trees grow from long-gone windows. At the national museum, an enthusiastic guide with near-perfect English was keen to show us their mementos of war and made no apology for his hatred of the Serbs nor his hero-worship of Adem Jashari, leading martyr of the KLA (Kosovo Liberation Army).  In 1999, the Serbs had run out of international sympathy, their leadership having spent the best part of the 1990s positioning them as the bad guys, and so the suffering of the Kosovo Serbs in KLA reprisals is conveniently forgotten.  One wonders if Kosovo can truly move its young nation forward without acknowledging this, though recent proposals for land swaps with Serbia might just clamp a convenient lid of denial on the issue forever, if the swaps can settle the dispute that is preventing both Serbia and Kosovo from joining the European Union.

Ibrahim Rugova looks down over Bulevardi Nena Tereze

If the city centre was a little more awake than the outskirts, it certainly burst alive at night.  Down the pedestrianised Bulevardi Nëna Terezë (named for Mother Teresa, another local hero), the air was full of the smell of singed corn on the cob, fanned over flames until it began to pop, the sweet smell of candyfloss and omnipresent Balkan cigarette smoke.  The sounds of the call to prayer mingled with the squeaks of toy dogs with demonic eyes. Children played amongst brightly lit jets of water and zipped around on battery powered ride-along jeeps. Watching over the crowds with fatherly benevolence loomed statues and photographs of Ibrahim Rugova, Kosovo’s first president.

A handful of notable buildings aside, Pristina’s attraction lies in the features that makes it so unattractive to the casual eye – its newness, its half-finished infrastructure, its struggle to define itself, to free itself from its recent history and to know whether it should draw its strength from within or without.  Who are the Kosovans most thankful to for their independence?  Pristina is a city half broken, half renewed but mostly coming alive.  It is a work in progress and it felt like a privilege to be there to witness this.  Kosovo may not top your list of travel destinations but to visit at the formation of a nation is a rare opportunity that will only be lost as time marches on.