It’s a seven hour bus ride from Belgrade to Pristina on one of the most cramped and dingy buses in the former Yugoslavia, made much worse by the stench of feet from the guy behind us. We got on at 10 PM and arrived in the rain before dawn. A taxi driver approached us and we asked him to take us to a cheap hotel, which is how we ended up with the Hotel Begolli, run by a sneaky fellow with gold teeth. After some useless bargaining, we accepted the 40 Euro apartment offered, with a living room furnished with pale green couches and a TV with a satellite that gets only German stations. The Euro is the going currency since the UN occupied the territory in 1999, but in the Serbian enclaves they still accept dinars. There are Pro-Credit Bank machines on all of the streets surrounding the UN Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) headquarters, which covers enough space to form a kind of central square in the middle of town.

After an espresso and a toast—sort of like a Cuban sandwich, with pork, cheese, a cream sauce, and some peppers and olives on the side—we headed over to the UNMIK headquarters to get accredited. During the riots in March, there was a fair amount of military activity and it’s good to get credentials so you don’t have to worry about taking pictures. Kosovo is currently divided into four zones controlled by British, American, and Italian troops, among others--a squadron of Indian soldiers were coming out as we passed the KFOR office on the way to UNMIK; after the riots in March there has been a real effort to create a common set of administrative standards, but the territory remains an occupied territory. A young Albanian working in the public information office, Shpend Berbatovci, met us at the UNMIK reception area and walked us through the UNMIK compound to the press office, where he had us fill out a form and took our pictures. While we were waiting I asked him some questions about the political status of the territory, whether he was pro-independence and what he thought of the Kosovar Albanian leadership. He had been living in Prishtina and going to law school in 1999 when Milosevic started the campaign to drive Albanians from the territory, and had been stopped a half-dozen times, but for some reason they always let him go. It was clearly upsetting him to remember what had gone on, and I realized how distant I was from the severity of what had happened. There were still a lot of wounds to be healed.

It was about 4 by the time we got all of the paperwork sorted out, and we stopped into a Turkish restaurant for some lamb kebabs and shopksa salads—tomatoes, cucumbers and onions with a grated feta cheese on top—and a couple of beers from a brewery in Peja. The sky was starting to clear up a bit and we decided there might be time to make it to Gracanica, the Serb enclave 5 to 10 kilometers outside of Pristina with an Orthodox monastery built in the 12th century. The waiter said it was possible to get a bus in front of the National Theater, but on the way we stopped into the Grand Hotel to compare room prices and decided to take a taxi from there for 15 Euros. The driver was a young good-looking Albanian wearing a black pin-striped coat. He was very nervous about waiting for us in the middle of the Serb village, but he agreed to drop us off and then wait outside the town and come back a half an hour later. It’s not safe for Albanians in the Serb areas, he said, and it’s not safe for Serbs in the Albanian areas. In front of the entrance to the Gracanica monastery, two American soldiers were standing next to a KFOR humvee with machine guns, and I walked up to one of them, a strong guy with a gentle demeanor, and asked if we could take some pictures. They were both National Guard troops from Iowa called up in the past year, both in their early 20s. We shot some pictures outside, then I asked if we could go in and take some pictures of the building. We should call the Turk back, he said, and got on a walkie-talkie. About a minute later, three more soldiers walked up, one an Albanian serving as a translator. The two of them went in and came back a few minutes later and said to go ahead in. Inside the church, nuns were singing in the nave and I lit a candle.

In the morning I managed to reach Delina, an Albanian from Albania who studied at the New School and has been based in Pristina for the past year working on a program for women sponsored by UNAID. After a while she began talking humorously about how useless and inefficient UNMIK was. She said that she even tells people privately that it’s easier working with the US Army. It seems that’s one thing everybody agrees about. Delina gave us some references for people to talk to and pointed out the building of the Kosovo Ministry of Culture across the street where we might be able to find an official familiar with the issues surrounding the preservation of historic sites. We decided to drop in, and after I explained to the secretary what we were researching, she went out and came back a few minutes later with Baki Svirka, director of the Kosovo Institute for Monument Protection. He agreed to go with us to Prizren the next day to show us the historic district there, which is the only one that hadn’t been destroyed since Serbia gained control of the territory after the first world war.

That afternoon, we had scheduled to meet Sokol Beqiri and Erzen Shokolloli, two Albanian artists who Miran Mohar from the Irwin Group put me in touch with in Ljubljana, so we headed to the bus station and caught the first bus to Peja. It’s about an hour and a half from Pristina, and we arrived at about 3:30 and took a taxi to the Victoria restaurant where we were supposed to meet Erzen. A year earlier, he and Sokol had opened the first and only gallery of contemporary art in Kosovo just across the park, and after a beer at the Victoria, he took us to see the current exhibit: three works on the theme of religion, all very funny. One of them was a series of photos called Supermuslim that shows a Muslim Superman taking off his red cape to use it as a prayer rug. Another one is a video of a mosque converted into a church that is covered in Christmas lights and has Jingle Bells and other popular holiday songs playing through its loudspeakers. We went for a walk around the market, which was completely burned to the ground in 1999 and has since been almost entirely rebuilt, and then stopped off for some cevapcici, grilled lamb fingers that are common throughout Serbia and probably throughout the former Ottoman empire. Erzen said the ones in Peja are the best.

Afterwards we met Sokol and he took us for a drive past the checkpoint where Italian troops are stationed to protect the Pec monastery and up into the mountains surrounding Peja, through astonishing cliffs with trees and waterfalls springing from their sides. There’s a little restaurant on a fork of the road that cuts through the mountains to Montenegro, where half of the city was sent when they were deported during the war. Most of the town was set on fire, and Sokol and his family were also deported. Later we went to his studio, which still has some personalized graffiti written by the Serb paramilitary on one wall, including a personalized greeting to Sokol from some of the blocks in New Belgrade. He showed us some of his work from before and after the war, poetic projects that in different ways respond to the incredible brutality of what had happened, expressions of despair and hope, criticism and paradox. In the remnants of the old town, we drank wine in what he described as a jazz bar playing various contemporary African American music. A few of their friends were there, one a security guard at the local UNMIK headquarters, the other a guy working with UNMIK to sell off state-owned businesses. I described what it was like in New York after the World Trade Center was attacked, which many people still ask about. I told them about Union Square, where people went to post pictures of their friends and family and light candles, and Erzen said “we were lighting candles too.”

The next morning, we had coffee on the terrace in front of the hotel, and I went to look for the local UNMIK headquarters, which as it turned out was just across the street. They were unhelpful as usual. Afterwards I called Sokol, and we went to meet his father, an architect who spent a decade teaching the theory of space in Belgrade. He showed us some of his work and talked about the way that architecture had been used as a political tool during the Milosevic era to assert Serbian claims to the territory. In some cases he said that they had sponsored church building projects where there wasn’t enough of a Serbian community to support them. I had scheduled a meeting with Major Fabio Iannello, an Italian KFOR officer who had offered to give us a tour of protected Serbian churches and historic sites, so we took a taxi to the Italian camp outside of Peja. As it turned out, there had been some misunderstanding and Iannello was actually stationed at the base in Pristina, but he arranged permissions for us in the monasteries at Pec and Decani. We had the driver drop us off at the checkpoint in front of the Pec monastery, and after the soldiers took our passport to be checked, we walked down the road below the cliffs to the church. More officers were stationed outside, and one of them walked us inside and knocked on the door. A nun greeted me and walked me across the interior courtyard to the church, a 13th century structure stuffed with frescos, icons and sarcophagi from the 14th to the 20th century. Pec hadn’t been attacked during the riots in March, when a lot of Serbian homes and churches were destroyed in the region. I bought a few candles and postcards and a book about the monastery and then lit the candles, and as we were walking out of the church the nun offered me some coffee. I sat down on a bench next to the fountain in front of the living area, and she brought out a plate of almond cakes, juice made from drvaci berries and two cups of Turkish coffee. I asked her name and she said “my name is not important, I am just a novice and the youngest one here.” Later she brought a carafe of slivovitsa for us to taste and we bought two large bottles.

We were already running late for our meeting later that day in Prizren, but I wasn’t able to get through to Baki Svirka—the telephone works rather sporadically in Kosovo—so we walked back to the edge of Peja and got a taxi to Decani for 12 Euros. At the checkpoint outside the Decani monastery, the officer in charge took our passports and called up a humvee to drive us up the road to the church. At the entrance to the living quarters, a young monk dressed in a black robe met me and walked me to the church. Decani is in very good condition and has all of the original frescoes from the 14th century in tact, although they are very faded and in need of restoration. I bought three candles there and lit them, and also a little ceramic box with incense inside and a reproduction of the Virgin Mary to give to Carlo and Laura. I had tried to arrange a meeting with Father Sava the previous evening, but we hadn’t been able to make it in time, and now a monk named Ksenofont came out and said that the Father wasn’t feeling well and wouldn’t be able to see me. I talked with him for a while about their situation—he had strong feelings and was slightly defensive when I asked about the relationship between the church and the nationalist leaders in Serbia. About the riots in March he told me, “We’re very well protected by the Italian troops. There were some mortars fired from the town, but they just fell in the hills.”

At around 6 we caught a bus from Decani to Prizren and arrived around 7. By the time we arrived at the Prizren League memorial, Baki had already left, so we got a room at the Hotel Tirana nearby and after a little rest went for a walk around the town to spec out sites for the next day. Prizren is situated in a valley surrounded by the mountains bordering Albania, and the town stretches along the banks of the river, with bridges every few hundred yards between the two sides, including an old stone footbridge arched in the traditional Ottoman manner. The hillside is filled with buildings torched during the March violence—the entire Serb district, which in any case was mostly abandoned in 1999, when Albanians effectively gained control. Several historic buildings were also destroyed, including an Orthodox church, and at the top of the hillside the soldiers were using the ruins of a church that was supposedly burned at the turn of the 20th century as a sentry and a campsite. KFOR had watched impotently as the mob burned the Serb district. According to the German soldier who toured us around the city in a humvee the next morning, there were some thousand people in the streets and it would have been a massacre if they had tried to stop them. Presumably they weren’t equipped for this kind of civil police action or they would certainly have had tear gas on hand.

After a late lunch of lamb kebabs and shopska salad, I decided to try to check out the German camp on the outskirts of the city. Supposedly there were about 50 Serbs being sheltered there, the last remnants of the Serb presence in the town, mostly older people. It was Friday, and by the time we got there the press officer had left for the weekend. I had heard that there was a Serb village of 600 called Novak around 30 kilometers away--rebuilt by the Germans after being destroyed in March--but the taxi driver wanted to charge 15 Euros and by then it was nearly time to pack for the 8 PM bus back to Belgrade. We stopped at a café by the river near the old Ottoman footbridge where they were playing a pretty rocking song by a local Kosovar band from the 80s. The CD started to have tracking problems, and then it was replaced by Pink Floyd’s Another Brick in the Wall. We drank our Peja beers, paid, and headed to the Hotel Tirana to check out.