Peace of mind

By Maria Mazurek

 

How do you make peace within yourself? For Anđela, being in nature helps. Petar finds it in beekeeping and spiritual martial arts. For us, spending a day in Gračanica seemed to do the trick. ‘Be present: hear the birdsongs, memorise the smiling faces around us, the love and laughter’. This is how Anne greeted us today in her good morning text. Though at first I didn’t give it much thought, now I really believe this text set a tone for the day.

 

10:00 at Newborn. By now, the café behind the distinctive sign – where, again and again, we spread around the tables and cross our fingers for the macchiato to come before we have to leave – has grown to be our true friend, a familiar rallying point. The routine brings us comfort. And yet, today was unique in that we got picked up by a UN-marked bus for the first time. Amusing how such a detail stirred up everyone’s excitement to the point of triggering multiple photoshoots. Talk about the significance of symbols.

 

Peace of mind first came up at the meeting with aforementioned Anđela and Petar, respectively from the Centre for Cultural Diversity and Minority Development and Young Active Gracanica. Asked about how they take care of their mental health in between peacebuilding activities, they both had a ready and heartfelt answer. It seemed like Anđela and Petar were perfectly aware of the mental toll potentially coming with peacebuilding, and they saw the idea of prioritizing inner peace as far from revolutionary. Since my (as well as Hanna and Nora’s) project explores what peace personally means to Kosovars, we approached Petar after the meeting, sat down in the beautiful garden and ended up hearing an equally beautiful story about how he developed a passion for the Japanese martial arts technique of ninjutsu. Laughing together at the Ninja Turtles cartoon being the inspiration for the hobby and seeing his warm smile, you could tell Petar found ways to preserve a calm mind. And as we continue to discover, such stories are pure joy to hear. Inner peace must then be contagious.

 

Hotel Gracanica was our next destination. The place screams special across the board. First, it is located on the outskirts of the town so that you fully immerse yourself in the silence and serenity of the Kosovar countryside. The vibrant inside does not disappoint visually either. We got to look around the hotel’s incredibly detailed and unique mixture of modern architecture and traditional design elements. In his short yet genuine presentation, Andreas, the Swiss founder and owner of the hotel, further explained the project’s commitment to eco-friendly practices, with solar heating panels, a healing mineral water fountain and a charging station for e-cars illustrating the point. Yet, what naturally stood out most for us, at this point completely invested in figuring out social attitudes within Kosovo, was the hotel’s pledge of bridging ethnic divides. You could tell Andreas took pride in the fact that the staff was multi-ethnic and co-management was shared between one half-Albanian, half-Serb and one Roma. I myself was absolutely charmed by Andreas’ mention of the hotel’s logo as a symbol of reconciliation. As he explained, the first ‘c’ in Hotel Gracanica graphically combines Albanian and Serbian languages, since the diacritic below comes from the Albanian ‘ç’ and the one above – from the Serbian ‘č’. A detail, yet with power. Once again, the electrifying discovery of the flavours of Kosovar symbolism continues.

 

And still, there was something bittersweet about the way Andreas spoke about Hotel Gracanica (note I am using the English spelling since the emblematic letter does not exist in the digital environment). I don’t think I am stretching it much when I say we all felt some heaviness in Andreas’ honest comment that building his beloved hotel in Gračanica, a predominantly Serbian-populated town, was a ‘strategic mistake’ as potential Albanian guests would simply opt for other places where they felt more comfortable. The fact that the majority of the staff is currently non-Albanian and employing Albanian Kosovars remains challenging seemed to further weigh on Andreas. The hotel did not seem very busy either. When asked about his motivations for going forward, Andreas’ answer differed slightly from the pretty big talk we perhaps expected. ‘Once you start a business, you can’t really stop’. 

 

Trying to understand peace, not to mention contribute to building it, can be daunting. Burnout and feelings of overwhelm come all in the game. I remember Andreas’ insights brought me back to the stories of Arber and Rajmonda from the Centre for Social Group Development who were both very open about having to take time off, sometimes for several months, from their peacebuilding efforts. I think our remaining time in Gračanica proved to be a similar breather which really showed us the value in slowing down, ‘being present and hearing the birdsongs’. Peace of mind was a key word here.

 

The air is different in Gračanica. Your lungs fill up with oxygen quicker. Having lunch in Hotel Gracanica’s beautiful garden with the sun fully out made it impossible not to breathe slower. We agreed the temperature today was close to perfect, exactly right for vibrantly orange aperol spritzs some of us enjoyed with our food and a card game session. References to stereotypical worry-free Italian summer get-aways were naturally made. The tranquility of the countryside was just incomparable to anything we so far experienced in Pristina, however much I love the dynamic city and its crazy drivers pretending no traffic rules exist. On the way back, as we stopped by and walked around the Ulpiana remains of an ancient Roman settlement, I also noticed our group had truly settled together by now. Whether doing handstands and cartwheels on Ulpiana’s open field and asking what surprised us most about each other, or chatting the night away over drinks in Pristina’s many bars we had grown so fond of, it feels as if we had really found comfort within the group. We can be playful in just about any circumstance, and that was certainly a heartfelt realization. I think today we managed to find inner peace in the combination of all the above. And inner peace is necessary to be radiated outwardly.