Prizren

By Eli Schwarer

 

South of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, a gem of a city sits nestled at the base of a snow-capped mountain. This is the first delight. We chose a warm day for our journey to the historic capital of Kosovo, Prizren city, and from the bus we delight in the contrast of summer warmth with the image of the snow reflecting sunlight cheerily from afar. Along our way, banks of silver and green grass are broken up by purple, yellow and red (the poppies, as across the rest of Europe, are out in full force), with the occasional flash of pink and white. The Kosovo landscape is fertile in an old-world way: small-scale agricultural activity is evident everywhere, and in the in-between flowers, shrubs and grasses abound. Mountains pour thick forests down into their valleys. Farmland hardly seems to need irrigation, as fields back onto thick-flowing rivers and springs all over. 

 

We arrive in Prizren at 11am, with the welcome shade of a slightly overcast, warm day. The city runs up and down the mountainside, hugging the white Prizren river. Some of the buildings are hundreds of years old, surviving from when Prizren was a bustling hub of Albanian and Turkish culture under the Ottoman empire. Most of the dwellings around the river have been rebuilt following the old style, so that along the banks of the river one could get lost in time, caught between the plastic toys being hawked on the bridges and the ancient bridges themselves. As you move further from the historic centre, the buildings become more modern, more utilitarian, and start to resemble the 21st century again. If you blink on a particular street, it is possible to imagine you have done some accidental time-traveling.

 

The group has a guide, but I break away from them with a friend fairly early: we have an appointment with an advocate-activist-artist from the city, Valtida Shukstria. I had made contact with her by happy coincidence, after engaging one of the officials at our EULEX visit in a conversation about Prizren's unique linguistic situation. The municipality of Prizren, unlike the rest of Kosovo, has not two but three official languages: Albanian, Serbian, and Turkish. More interesting still is the contrast in official language use: in Pristina, as in most of the rest of Kosovo, people who did not learn both Albanian and Serbian in school simply use English to communicate across language barriers. Not so in Prizren, where one can speak whichever language one pleases, including the Roma dialect of the region, and most people have a serviceable level in at least Serbian, Albanian, Turkish and English. A sociolinguistic treasure trove if ever there were one, and our contact at EULEX, a native Prizrenian, was eager to talk about it, and put me in touch with Valtida for our day-trip. From Valtida, I learned the most fascinating part of this linguistic puzzle: schools are segregated by language (Turkish, Albanian and German), and children are not forced to learn other languages in school, though it is often an option. This struck me, because it means most acquisition, especially of the Prizren Romani dialect and Serbian, which do not have separate schooling systems, happens entirely in the course of unofficial interaction. 

 

Prizren is prized across Kosovo as an example of diversity and integration, and locals speak of it with obvious pride. Yet it does not escape the ethnic animosity that plagues the rest of the country. Loose but present ethnic divisions are still drawn in everyday activity, and there are subtle indicators of discrimination, such as the fact that some signs, which are supposed to carry information in all official languages (in the order of Albanian, Serbian, Turkish, and optionally English) exclude Turkish and change the order. In spite of this, languages proliferate in practice, and the effect is that Prizren takes on this character as a timeless city, where progressive politics take place in the same streets and buildings that housed, in centuries past, important intellectual and political movements in Kosovo's history. 

 

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We meet up with Valtida and she takes us on a brisk walk up and down the cobbled streets, stopping to exchange a few words on every street corner with some friend or coworker, and speaking at a mile a minute. She is full of passion and knowledge about Prizren, and eager to share it with us. In her busy schedule of running a law firm, engaging in activism for everything from women's rights to environmental sustainability and historic site conservation, being an artist, raising a child and seemingly knowing everyone in Prizren, she found two hours to spend with us, and used every minute of it. But what else would one expect? - as she said, one needs 8 hours for sleep, and then there are 16 hours in the day for everything else. 

 

We get a tour of the less touristy spots in the city. Valtida has a campaign for educating people about the architecture of Prizren, and she shows us a door which is set into a frame on the side of the mountain just under the old castle. The door is hundreds of years old and still displays a dual knocker system (for men and women) which was popular in the Ottoman period. The door has a hand-cast heavy metal lock shaped like a snake, a symbol of security. Further on down the same road, and round the bulge of the mountain, Valtida shows us an Old World sycamore (also called an Eastern Plane) which is at least 500 years old, and has a massive trunk with sprawling roots. If the river ever floods, the tree is in a precarious position, but while it flows gently past, the shade of the large leaves and gentle spray of the water is refreshing. A final stop at the publically owned Kino Lumbardhi cinema, where we sit to share a coffee and interview Valtida about her work, and we part to see if we can meet up with the rest of our group again. 

 

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Famished, we snake our way back up the streets to a little restaurant that Valtida had pointed out on our walk: Noja, the only vegetarian joint in Prizren, set snuggly into a narrow side street above the main circle. From here, the day became somewhat of a fairy tale. 

 

Noja is already unique for its vegetarian menu (as we heard time and again, the favourite meal of most Kosovars is straight up 'meat', so Noja cuts against the grain a little, but does so with superb style). However, what really sets the place apart for me are two aspects. Firstly, the kitchen is a normal, household kitchen. The counter has been augmented with stainless steel, but besides that the fridge displays family photos and recipes, the shelves are stocked like my mother's pantry, with jars of lentils and rice and terracotta crockery, and the stove is your average good-quality but not industrial grade stove. The head chef is a young woman who decided to open the restaurant during Covid, after building up a client base with a food stand at the Lumbardhi. Her mother cooks with her, and handles the accounts. I engage them in conversation, eager to chat shop about the joys of cooking, and they share a recipe with me for a delightful summer dish (fried Balkan cheese, roasted peppers, watermelon and cornbread). As mother and daughter move back and forth in the small kitchen, preparing the delicious falafel wrap, soup, and pasta that we ordered, they shout ingredients to me, checking quantities with each other and disagreeing over exactly how liquid the batter of the bread must be. They clearly love food. 

Their passion shows in the cooking: with each bite my friend and I sink further into bliss. A summer vegetable soup with croutons and a fresh, pumpkin yellow colour sets a good tone for the meal. The lentil hummus in the wrap is silky, pairing beautifully with the lemon juice drizzle. And to crown it all, Jufka, a traditional Prizreni pasta with cheese and dill sauce, a subtle flavour combination which lifts the creamy texture to make the meal light and refreshing. A few black olives, and a sprinkle of dill, constitute the perfect garnish to deepen the flavour of this dish, and we dig in with relish. Having eaten well but carnivorously all week, in an attempt to embrace the local cuisine, it is pleasant to indulge in creative vegetarian delicacies. Follow it up with fresh rose water, and what more could you want?

 

But here is the real magic of the place, the reason we stayed over two hours, skipping the lovely ascent to the castle ruins and a number of the beautiful religious monuments: Dede. Noja is a family business, and while the daughter and mother cook and chat with customers in the main room, the uncle, who everyone calls Dede (meaning grandfather) reigns supreme in the side room and at the tables on the street. Seldom have I met a more charismatic character, someone who revelled so clearly in storytelling and performance. To call him a performer is not to say that he is insincere - only that to him, it appears that conversation is an artform. He is certainly a master. An expert in reading the room, he follows up his jovial greeting by sounding us out, making sure that we are comfortable with a third at our table. Sensing that we had stumbled on a gold mine, we asked him to join us and talk, and except for one or two diversions to talk to local customers out on the street he stayed with us the whole time we were there. 

 

In his green beret and wolf's tooth necklace, Dede is a tall and kind-faced man. His family is from Turkey, and he loves Prizren and all the people there. He tells us all about the horse he raised from a foal, the strong bond he built with it. He introduces us to a hunter whose hair and nails are immaculate and who knows the surrounding lands like the back of her hand. He talks about the history of the restaurant, the history of Prizren, and the people he has met. And he tells us a story about the Old World sycamore worthy of the name: that the tree speaks, when one listens, of the children and lovers and friends who have taken solace in her shades, of the conversations on hot summer days and the passing of the centuries beneath her boughs, and the people who pissed on her roots, and the bugs that crawled on her. 

'So,' she asks, 'what the hell are you doing? Why do you fight like this?' 

With tears in his eyes, and with far more pathos than I could ever do justice to, Dede recounts his tale of the sycamore. If I ever needed proof that storytelling is an art, there it was. 

 

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We give our reluctant goodbyes, and rejoin our group, to hop back on the bus and make our way over the border. The perfect day is finished off in the cleft between some mountains in rural Albania, swimming in a massive lake. The water is pure and cold, the sky is clear, and everywhere we look the afternoon sun reflects gold and green. 

Though we sit together every night over dinner, our day in Prizren was the best example of good food and good company being all one needs to be happy.