A Week in Kosovo – Part Two

In Part One, Ben and I visited Pristina and Prizren.

Gjakova

From Prizren, we went on to Gjakova, with a warning from our Prizren hosts that most visitors only spend a couple of hours in this city, stopping to check out the ‘Old Bazaar’ on their way to Peja. But, as we’d discovered, most visitors only spend three days or so in Kosovo, so we had time to kill. And Ben was withering in the heat and needed a night of air conditioning, so we booked a night in La Villa, on the outskirts of Gjakova. The hotel turned out to be in the middle of nowhere, a good half hour walk from the centre of town. It seemed we were the only guests for the night, but then a lot of people arrived the next morning for breakfast. Strangest of all, there was a pool – a pool which you were not allowed to swim in. I strongly believe that in 35+ degrees weather this is paramount to torture. It did have a good breakfast though.

Having dumped our stuff in the hotel room and found the Old Bazaar – which, as with many of the other sights in the post-war country, is not actually old at all, the Old one having been destroyed and re-built in the 2000s. The Bazaar is more like a scene from an old Western movie than the North African style market that I envision when I hear the word ‘bazaar’. It was definitely cute – little wooden fronted shops in streets lined with lanterns, but it didn’t take us long to wander up and down a few times. We unsuccessfully tried to get into the mosque, but the only time it was open was at prayer time, and despite my totally culturally appropriate attempt at covering my head, I don’t think it would have been appreciated if us infidels when wandering in then. We took some photos and cafe-hopped for a while, settling for a shady spot by the river since most of the cafes in the bazaar area were populated by chain-smokers, making sitting outside really quite unpleasant.

 

We tried to go to the museum, but discovered we’d just missed its opening hours (if it was ever open, you’ll have noticed that this was somewhat the theme of our holiday), and decided to go up the one hill in town for a good view (and maybe some cooler air). Wandering around Gjakova, which had been pretty much obliterated during the war, made me realise just how embarrassingly little I knew about the history of the conflict, so, we spent an hour or so educating ourselves courtesy of wikipedia before we got depressed and switched to playing hangman.

Gjakova from above

Peja aka Pec

We were looking forward to getting to Peja – described as a mountain town, with a few more sights to see. We stayed in Hostel Sarac, another little family-run place. It was really cute, with a nice outdoor space (including a hammock), making for a more social atmosphere than the other places we stayed, and (hurray!) fans in the dorms. We happened to arrive at the same time as an Australian girl, and together we set off in search of one of Peja’s most famous sights: the cheese market. The hostel owner gave us vague directions and told us we couldn’t miss it, just to follow the stream of people who would be heading that way. And so began a two hour trek around town, stopping to ask everyone we met and failing to make ourselves understood by most people. The few who did manage to understand the question sent us in the direction of the supermarket. We attempted asking young people who tended to speak some English – two school age boys who simultaneously pointed in different directions, and then a teen girl who replied “I didn’t know we HAD a cheese market!”. Eventually we decided we didn’t really want cheese anyway, and headed to get the bus for the monastery.

The monastery turned out to be half way back along the road to Gjakova, and then a walk along a road into the woods. When we got there, surprise, surprise – it was shut! But only for a little while, we were informed by the armed UNESCO guards who are there to protect the Serbian Orthodox monastery from marauding Muslim Albanians. They took our passports from us before we were allowed in, and we were also informed that one of us was not dressed appropriately. For once, that was Ben, not us women. Ben’s knees were deemed offensive, and so he was forced to pay a couple of euros for this delightful dressing-gown like garment:

Quite the investment, I’d say.

 

No photos were allowed in the monastery, and I’m a rule-follower, so you’ll have to trust me when I say it was quite spectacular (and Google it if you don’t believe me).

The next day, we went for a walk in the forest. I’m going to pause here to do some free advertising for an app we discovered while in Kosovo: maps.me. It’s like Google maps (actually someone told me you can do the same thing with Google maps, but I have no idea how so I still think this is cooler), but you can use it without a data connection (having downloaded the map) because it works on GPS, and you can share routes and landmarks with others – so the hostel hosts had recorded various walks we could do. It was so useful for the rest of our trip, since we were guidebook-less.

The walk took us to another Serbian Christian building before heading out of town – the Patriarchate, which, while it sounds like it might the name of an “angry girl music of the indie rock persuasion” band (ten points if you spot the 1990s teen movie reference), is actually a nunnery. I KNOW, why is a nunnery named after the patriarchy? Well, because the whole concept of being a nun and marrying oneself to Jesus in lieu of finding a husband is a symbol of… no, ok, I’ve looked this up so you don’t have to – it became a nunnery after World War II. Anyway. It’s pretty. Probably prettier for those who are into Jesus, there were a couple of older women in there who were definitely having some kind of epiphany. But again photos weren’t allowed.

We then continued along the road out of town for our walk. I should explain at this point: I am not a hiker. Part of this is sheer laziness: I am really unfit; part of it is due to my dodgy knees/hips/back which are liable to hurt in any combination at any point. But mostly it’s just because I just don’t find nature very interesting. There. I said it. I can willingly walk around a city for hours, on nice paved (or sandy) streets, soaking up the atmosphere but I will get bored half an hour into any walk along a muddy path.

Basically, I’m more interested in people than trees. Which is why the most interesting part of the walk, mostly along a tarmac road into a valley, punctuated with a few people-based sights in the way of the via ferrata (which is just about my worst nightmare) and a zipline (which conversely didn’t look nearly scary enough to be fun), was a strange little hippy camp on a beach. This photo doesn’t nearly do it justice:

On our way back, we stopped at a little beach spot on the river, full of kids playing in the water and parents scoffing food. We did attempt to go in the water, but each lasted about 30 seconds because it was sooo cold – and I was pretty uncomfortable being in a bikini because ogling women even when fully clothed (I didn’t know what was appropriate so I wore maxi skirts all week) seems to be the done thing in Kosovo.

So clear but so cold

Ben, who most definitely is a hiker, had always been planning to take another path off the main road to go up another circuit that the hostel hosts had suggested. After lunch and drying off from the river, we found the bottom of the trail and a sign that said 40 mins. We assumed this meant that it would only be a 40 minute loop, so I decided to join, buoyed by the fact that my hips weren’t hurting since the last path had been along flat road. Error. The sign lied. Or, we can’t speak Albanian. Either way, we went up and up and up on a rough track which would have been fine if it hadn’t, as I keep reminding you, been over 30 degrees. We somehow managed to take a wrong turn and miss the view point as well, but we did reward ourselves (with cake, for me, and yoghurt, for my weirdo friend) at a hotel restaurant when we made it back to civilisation, which is in my opinion a better reward than a view anyway.

Pristina and the Slightly Bad Thing

We took the train, rather than the bus, back to Pristina the next day, for no real reason other than we had time on our hands (it takes longer than the bus) and Ben happens to particularly like trains. The third person we asked managed to show us how to buy tickets (it turned out we were mainly hampered by there not being anyone in the ticket booth the first time we tried) and we settled in to an ancient (decidedly not air-conditioned) train, with a little old lady asking us if we had babies yet. It was my turn to be too hot and grumpy (and I suspect dehydrated from running out of water on our walk the day before) and I was not a very happy bunny by the time we finally pulled into Pristina – although perhaps somewhat happier than the screaming baby that had been next to us for most of the journey.

Ok. I’ve painted a lovely picture of Kosovo so far and you’re convinced you should definitely go there on your holidays, right?

Well, then, as we pull back into Pristina on the slow train I think it’s time to tell you about that Slightly Bad Thing that happened on our first evening. You’ll remember that we had been in the country for all of two hours by this point, and I left the story with us walking back towards our hostel from the Bill Clinton statue, discussing what a ‘nice’ feel the city had to it, and how quiet it was, being the last day of Ramadan. An ambulance drove past us, which we remember because we commented on how slow it was going – the windows weren’t blacked out so we could actually see the paramedics working on someone in the back.

Talk turned to other things for a few moments, until we made it back to the main street. A crowd had gathered, all facing the same way, towards a bar on a corner with outside seating. Crowds make me anxious, particularly unexplained crowds, so my sense of danger kicked in.

‘What’s going on here then?’
‘Oh there’s police tape’
‘Is that…’
‘BLOOD?!’

It was blood. Lots and lots of blood. More blood than I have ever seen not-in-a-hospital TV show (and then I hide behind cushions). We scarpered past the crowd and must have been looking more than a little concerned because a (strangely) chuckling young man approached us, and casually said, ‘guys in this country are like… terrorists, you know?’

Oh dear. Had all my insisting that Kosovo was a perfectly safe destination  for travel these days been all wrong (I’m sure I Googled it? I must have Googled it. Right?)? The young man went on to explain, in somewhat broken English that we clarified with the man who worked in the hostel when we got back. It turns out that there are customary laws in the mountainous areas of Kosovo where blood feuds – you killed my sister so I have permission to kill you, and that should be the end of it, but obviously it won’t be because your brother will then kill me then my father will kill… etc – are still a thing. The term had popped up in my research (I totally Googled it.) before travelling, but I got the impression that it was either an old tradition that had died out, or a weird custom between a couple of mafia-like families in the mountain villages. Not that we would walk past a murder (I don’t know if the guy died but there was a LOT of blood..) scene in the middle of Pristina! Random man on the street told us that one family that has lost 500 boys – I have no idea if that’s accurate. We were assured that such things rarely happen in Pristina, though, so don’t let our unfortunately timed walk put you off visiting. Or at least make rational decisions with the knowledge that 11 people died from knife crime in a 16 day period in London earlier this year 

So being back in Pristina was good for us to get a better impression – and actually, I’m going to have to make that a third post because this is getting so long – but, spoiler alert: no stabbings or other violent crimes were witnessed the second time around.

Part Three coming soon! Here’s something even creepier to take your mind off the blood feud.

This dummy in a Gjakova shop has seen better days.

A Week in Kosovo, Part One.

What do you think of when you hear the word Kosovo?

There’s probably a good chance that you thought of war and refugees, especially if you’re a similar age to me, making the late 90s conflict one of the first that you might remember being aware of.

You probably didn’t think of a holiday destination.

Neither did I, to be honest, but I had one page left in my passport to be stamped and not much money, it was late June (so too hot for Morocco), and my friend/travel buddy Ben only had one week free so we couldn’t go too far afield. And it turns out, Wizz Air fly direct to Pristina from Luton.

Before I get to Kosovo, let me tell you that Luton airport is now in my Top Three Worst Airports – which you might not think is a very serious allegation but remember that in 2008 I spent nine hours stuck in the airport in Tripoli, Libya, so you should believe me when I say Luton airport is bad.

Pristina

The first thing we noticed on flying into Kosovo was how green and hilly it was. And that’s coming from a Scot.

We stayed in Hostel Han in the centre of Pristina. I don’t know whether hostel standards in general have improved in the better part of a decade since I last stayed in one, or whether this was exceptional, but honestly, it was the cleanest hostel I have ever set foot in. It was about 8 by the time we checked in, and still light, so we headed straight back out to explore. The hostel was situated just off the main boulevard, which has a mediterranean feel to it with all the outdoor seating so we wandered along there and then realised we weren’t too far from the Bill Clinton statue we had sped past in the taxi. Every town we visited had a Bill Clinton street, and there were Tony Blair roads and George Bush avenues as well – pretty strange to see considering the reputation of the latter two warmongers former leaders in the UK.

Bill Clinton in his current occupation as thing-for-children-to-chase-each-other-around

Heading back to town, a slightly bad thing happened. I’m not going to tell you about that now because it will cloud your judgement. I’ll put it at the end. After the Slightly Bad Thing, we went for dinner. When we picked up the menu, we were shocked at the prices. Everything is SO CHEAP. A meal is 2-3 euros, and a large (600ml) beer is the same again. I chose the vegetarian option, which turned out to be a large bowl of super salty baked beans. I learned my lesson and resigned to carnivorism for the rest of the trip.

I’m an all-or-nothing vegetarian.

It was Eid the next day. We chatted with the guy working in the hostel – a super friendly archaeology student – over breakfast about religion in Kosovo, learning that most people identify as Muslim but aren’t really practicing. We planned to leave Pristina straight away, as we were coming back to explore before our return flight, and he assured us the buses would be running as usual – in hindsight we should have doubted this when he had to share his own muesli with us because all the bakeries were shut. In fact when we arrived at the bus station, we were told that there wasn’t a bus to our destination for some four hours. This is also when we discovered that most people in Kosovo don’t speak any of the languages that we speak (only 3.5 and some odd bits between us, none of them related to Albanian. Thankfully, an American girl (Peace Corps, I’m guessing…) took pity on us and explained we could ask one of the buses going to Tirana to stop in Prizren for us, and that is exactly what we did (with the help of an Albanian girl who translated for the driver), setting off 20 minutes later. We think the bus actually made a detour into the city for us and two others who had the same predicament, and it still only charged us 5 euros each.

Prizren

In Prizren, we stayed in Driza’s House, a little family run hostel in the very centre of the town with a teeny tiny little kitten (that I’m definitely allergic to, but bless the hosts, they scooped him up whenever he tried to come near me). We arrived mid-afternoon and it was hot. And we were hungry. Every restaurant was shut because of Eid, but we eventually found a cafe to perch in. Kosovo is famed – well, I’m not exactly sure with what audience, but it claims to be famed – for offering the world’s best macchiatos. I can’t vouch for this, because although I drank a few, I’ve never drunk a macchiato in any other country. And I have terrible coffee tastes (either cheap black filter coffee from Pret, or a latte with enough sugary syrup to disguise the taste of milk)

Ben modelling a macchiato

Prizren livened up later in the afternoon. The host – the younger of two brothers who run the hostel that used to be their family home – invited us to join him (and his girlfriend and her friend) at an Eid party. The party turned out to be an open air club in the shadow of the mosque. Interestingly, our host and it seemed many of the others weren’t drinking beer. Not because of their Muslim faith, but because it was Eid and apparently that means that they shouldn’t drink until midnight. I’m all for the adaptation of religious holidays. It could have be fun… if we had been ten years younger. We escaped and went for a wander around the garden of the mosque (which, it turned out, had some gift shops and a cafe selling what looked suspiciously like beer…) and a late dinner.

Ain’t no party like a mosque Eid party.

The next day we attempted to see the sights of Prizren. These include the mosque (shut, although we managed to poke our (covered) heads in later on), the church (the priest is in Greece for an unspecified length of time), and an old (sort of, it was rebuilt) stone bridge (see photo below). A quick whizz around an ethnographic museum which consisted of one building with some traditional outfits with no explanations whatsoever, and another full of photos of men. Actually, we found the most interesting thing in the museum to be how, instead of getting ‘female’ mannequins for the women’s outfits, they had just pulled the short-haired heads of some ‘male’ ones, meaning the few representations of women that were to be found in the museum were all headless. Great.

It was hot, and we wanted to get out of the city a little. Our hostel hosts had told us there would be a bus every half an hour or so to what we thought was a village in the mountains (but turned out just to be a strange little holiday spot). It turned out, when we got to the spot to catch the bus, that there were no buses. Are you getting déjà vu yet? This time we gave in and got a taxi for the half hour journey, which cost us a princely sum (18 euros, if I remember correctly). The temperature got better as soon as we were a bit higher, and we were treated to a good chat with the driver. By which I mean Ben had a chat with the driver in broken German (Ben’s, the driver’s was better), while I demanded translation. It turns out German (or indeed Norwegian, which is what Ben actually speaks) is a much more useful language in Kosovo than English (or French. Or, you know, Wolof.). We ended up in on a Sound of Music-esque hilltop and had a very wholesome afternoon with our books.

Don’t be fooled by how many clothes this family are wearing, it was still too hot up here.

The trouble started when it was time to get back to town. We asked a man in a restaurant when the next bus was, only to hear it was about two hours later (yes, again). We asked some men… selling things or loitering… who offered to drive us back down for a ridiculous amount, and so decided to hitch hike. We’d heard positive things about how easy it is to hitch a ride in Kosovo, but it turns out we’re not very good at it. After a good 15 minutes of standing on the wrong side of the road (it was logical, we could see around the corner), a shopkeeper took pity on us and gave us some cardboard to write a sign. It also may have helped that Ben – tall white man – then left me – lone young-ish female – at the side of the road while he popped in to buy some water, because the very next car (with two middle aged men in it) stopped. Ben came running out and they seemed like they might drive off, but the nice man from the shop managed to persuade them to take us after all. They spoke very little English, but the driver called his daughter who lives in Bradford to tell us they would drop us off before the main town (but they must have changed their minds, because we ended up right next to our hostel)!

The other thing to see in Prizren is the ruins of an old castle, or, more interestingly, the view from the castle at the top of a very steep hill. We headed up for sunset and I made Ben partake in a windswept photoshoot.

So many minarets

Part 2, featuring Gjakova, Peja, and Pristina (again) coming soon (although let’s be real it took me two months to write this part)