Kosovo

I haven't been very productive this month in describing Kosovo. So perhaps the simplest observations are those I've had during a few weekends of day tripping around the country, to Mitrovica, Prizren and Novo Brdo.

Zvečan

Novo Brdo

Kosovo can be startlingly beautiful. Hilltop fortresses - in particular at Zvečan and Novo Brdo - offer amazing panoramic views of vast tracts of open empty countryside, rolling hills, green fields. Except that such views also demonstrate two common problems: pollution and decay.

Novo Brdo

The fortresses are not only ruined but are entirely unprotected, unfenced and unpoliced, and seem to be actively crumbling. I literally saw pieces of masonry fall down hillsides as daytrippers scrambled and climbed over the monuments, which were often scrawled with graffiti and usually strewn with litter. These are amongst Kosovo's oldest and most precious structures, but they literally decay before your eyes.

The problem of pollution is perhaps even more pressing (or depressing). I can't claim to have seen much of Kosovo, but abandoned industrial plants seem to be everywhere, no matter how isolated or rural the area. The infamous dirty coal-powered electricity plant at Obilic pumps vast, filthy clouds of smoke across Pristina and the surrounding area, but at least it's put to productive use. Most of the industrial facilities I've seen are long-closed, many presumably since the collapse of the socialist state, others since the conflict. They look as if they were not so much shut down as literally abandoned: as if someone simply closed the door at the end of a working day and never came back. Debris, waste materials and scrap usually lie around and outside the buildings; doors hang half open; shards of glass still remain in the window frames. Most of these plants are indistinguishable - there's no way to guess what used to be produced here.

Perhaps more tragic is the human pollution and decay which accompanies them. Novo Brdo's only urban area, for instance, is an abandoned mining town, consisting of nothing more than three small apartment blocks, a tiny grocery shop in a construction which looks like a portacabin, and a single, shiny new building which was constructed to house the local municipality. The municipality building is bigger than the single school and is the only building in this tiny little collection which doesn't look as if it's rotting from the inside out. Since the mines closed the former employees have remained in the apartment buildings, subsisting on who knows what. Seeing the kind of socialist-style housing blocks which are patently designed for a utopian urban environment - the kind which surround every city in Eastern Europe - decaying in the middle of verdant, uncultivated countryside dotted with industrial waste, surrounded by rough yards where chickens peck the dirt and the occupants grow small patches of vegetables in order to get by, was one of the more bizarre and heartbreaking sights I've seen since I arrived.

Kosovo also differs from Bosnia however in terms of how the recent troubles and conflict here manifest themselves. In Bosnia the signs of recent war are brutal and in-your-face brash: bullet holes on walls across Sarajevo, collapsing buildings, the circular marks from shells. Here however, the buildings which look like they've just seen the end of the war mostly are not the result of damage of the 1999 conflict, but of the ethnic conflict which has followed it and which still takes place on a continual basis. Most of the houses which appear bombed have in fact been looted: such houses were generally abandoned by ethnic minority owners such as Kosovo Serbs, who were displaced due to overt violence (such as during serious rioting in 2004) or as a result of the low-level but constant, daily thrum of intimidation, hostility and aggression which continues between the communities in Kosovo. Their homes, once they had left, were systematically dismantled by the remaining residents who take not only any useful materials such as windows, doors and even the bricks, but in effect destroy the displaced persons' links to their old home. The houses in the photo below are in Prizen, in a neighbourhood which used to be predominantly Serb but which today is quickly succumbing to trees and bushes.

But finally, on a lighter note, my favourite signs on Kosovo's roads. Yes, the international community is far more apparent and obvious here than in Bosnia, particularly in terms of the military presence. It's still common to see convoys of NATO trucks, ambulances and armoured personnel carriers on patrol. In most countries, bridges carry a sign stating the weight limit for passing trucks and heavy vehicles, but in Kosovo every bridge carries a second sign with the designated weight limits for tanks. Makes me giggle, every time. Though perhaps really, not all that amusing.