Documentray: Stolen Kosovo

Slight change? 1 POINT 8 PERCENT to what is it today? 96 percent? That is slight? And how do you, an Albanian, get the right to tell Serbs where their cultural center was? It was natural for them to move north when you had people trying to kill you and forced you to move north.

Oh but please I insist. And how many mosques were destroyed exactly?

Architectural Heritage in Kosovo: A Post-War Report

              By Andrew Herscher and Andras Riedlmayer

The authors:

    Andrew Herscher is an architect, PhD candidate in architectural

    history and theory at Harvard University, and co-director of the

    Kosovo Cultural Heritage Project.

    Andras J. Riedlmayer directs the Aga Khan Program's

    Documentation Center for Islamic Art and Architecture at

    Harvard's Fine Arts Library and is co-director of the Kosovo

    Cultural Heritage Project

Andras J. Riedlmayer

Fine Arts Library

Harvard University

>From the spring of 1998 until the summer of 1999, Kosovo was the

scene of armed conflict and savage "ethnic cleansing." Thousands of

the region's Kosovar Albanian inhabitants were killed and nearly a

million were driven from their homes. Less well known than the human

tragedy is the fate of Kosovo's rich cultural heritage

Serbs blamed the Nato bombing of course:

Among the monuments and sites reported to have been destroyed or seriously

damaged by the air strikes: the Gracanica monastery near Prishtina;

the Decani monastery; the Pec Patriarchate complex; the Church of

the Virgin Ljeviska and the Sinan Pasha Mosque in Prizren; the

Prizren League Museum; the Hadum Mosque complex in Gjakova (Serbian:

Djakovica); the historic bazaars in Gjakova and Pec (Albanian:

Peja); the Roman Catholic church of St. Anthony in Gjakova; and two

old Ottoman bridges, Ura e Terzive (Terzijski most) and Ura e

Tabakeve (Tabacki most), near Gjakova. These allegations were given

wide publicity on Internet web sites, in the news media, in

professional forums (including the US/ICOMOS Newsletter), and in two

white books issued by the Yugoslav government.[1] On June 1, 1999,

Yugoslavia's ambassador to UNESCO announced that the old parts of

the Kosovo city of Prizren and the provincial capital Prishtina had

been completely destroyed by NATO bombing.[2]

Meanwhile, eyewitness accounts by Kosovar refugees also spoke of

cultural destruction. In a survey of Kosovar refugee heads of

households in camps in Albania and Macedonia, carried out in

April-May 1999 by the NGO Physicians for Human Rights, nearly half

(47 percent) of the respondents reported seeing mosques destroyed by

Serb forces before they left Kosovo.[3]

Thus, we made it our goal to ascertain, insofar as possible, the

condition of all cultural and religious monuments and institutions,

whether listed or not, that were reported to have been damaged.

Covering both wartime and post-war destruction, the survey was

primarily a damage assessment. Limitations on our time and resources

and the difficulties of access to some sites prevented us from

making a more detailed study of each monument.

Our survey database has 268 entries for architectural monuments,

representing sites we visited during our fieldwork in October 1999

We found that out of the four well-preserved historic urban centres

in Kosovo three old towns--Pec, Gjakova, Vushtrri (Serbian:

Vucitrn)--had suffered severe devastation. Allegations by the

Yugoslav authorities notwithstanding, it was evident both from the

nature of the damage we saw and from the statements of eyewitnesses

we interviewed that this destruction was not the result of aerial

bombardment.

Albanian historical buildings

The historic city of Prizren survived the war without

significant damage to any of its monuments, except for the Museum of

the 1878 Albanian League of Prizren, which was burned down on March

28, 1999, by Serbian police using rifle-propelled grenades

War damage in the capital was largely

limited to a handful of modern government buildings, including the

Serbian police headquarters and the post and telecommunications

centre, which were hit by NATO air strikes; one 16th-c. neighborhood

mosque and a number of Albanian houses and shops were burned by

Serbian forces during the war.

Other allegations of NATO bombing damage to cultural monuments in

Kosovo also proved to be unfounded. In Gjakova, for example, we

found the two Ottoman-era bridges, both alleged to have suffered

direct hits, to be completely intact.

In the small towns and villages of the countryside, traditional

residential architecture was also a major target in the recent

conflict. Ottoman-era town houses (konak, shtepia) of prominent

Albanian families, and the stone tower-residences (kulla) that are

indigenous to this area of the Balkans and typical of Albanian

traditional architecture, had clearly been singled out for

destruction by Serb forces during the "ethnic cleansing" campaigns

of the summer of 1998 and the spring of 1999. Of some 500 kullas in

Kosovo, most built during the 18th-19th c. and inhabited by

generations of the same families, barely 10 per cent are estimated

to have survived the war intact.

Catholic churches

The Roman Catholic church of

St. Anthony had been taken over by soldiers from the nearby Yugoslav

army base, who evicted the Albanian priests and the nuns from the

church and convent "half an hour before the war (i.e. the NATO

bombing) began," according to the parish priest, Fr. Ambroz Ukaj.

The church and the convent were used as a military command centre

for the next two months, while the army base was flattened by NATO's

air strikes. The only damage to the church, other than windows

broken by air blast, was that caused by Yugoslav soldiers who

thoroughly looted and vandalized the premises before they left in

early June 1999.

Mosques

Another category of historical architecture in urgent need of

protection in Kosovo is Muslim houses of worship. This part of

Europe is home to an indigenous Islamic tradition going back more

than 600 years,

This heritage suffered

massive destruction during the recent conflict. In the majority of

cases, it was evident from the statements of eyewitnesses, from the

type of damage (mosques burned out from within, with no bullet or

shrapnel holes; minarets that had been blown up with explosives

placed inside, causing the stone spire to collapse onto the

building), and from visible signs of vandalism (Koran manuscripts

ripped from bindings and burned or defaced with human excrement,

crude anti-Muslim and anti-Albanian graffiti in Serbian on the walls

of destroyed and desecrated mosques) that this destruction was not

the result of military activities. These were not buildings that had

been caught in the crossfire as Serbian forces fought Albanian

rebels, or hit by NATO's bombs and missiles.

According to statistics published before the war, there were 607

mosques in Kosovo as of 1993. Of these, 528 were congregational

mosques (xhamia) of which 498 were in active use, and 79 smaller

mosques (mesxhid) of which 70 were in active use; the majority dated

from Ottoman times.[8] More than 200 of these mosques--a third of

all Islamic houses of worship in Kosovo--were destroyed or damaged

during the recent conflict, according to our survey and

documentation we examined in the offices of the Islamic Community.

Orthodox Churches

Although much concern was expressed during last spring's NATO

bombing campaign about the fate of Kosovo's medieval Orthodox

churches and monasteries, in fact we found no evidence that any

Orthodox sites had suffered serious damage during the war--either

from NATO bombs or at the hands of Albanian rebels.

After the end of the war, however, the situation with respect to Serbian Orthodox heritage changed for the worse.

http://palimpsest.stanford.edu/byform/mailing-lists/cdl/2000/1124.html

enough?