I was there from Srebrenica through Dayton to the temporary, if somewhat shaky, peace of It was, in many ways, a life-changing experience for me. It was almost impossible for me to get to Serbia when I was there, and there was no real reason to visit Kosovo. Subsequently, I have been to Belgrade, which still feels like the capital city of a country that no longer exists β full of unexpected charm and energy.
When I was invited to attend the Kosovo Theatre Showcase , I jumped at the chance to finally see this part of the Balkans and experience its cultural offerings. I knew the legends about the place β that the whole war stemmed from a speech Milosevic gave on a battlefield known as Kosovo Polje in Serbian and Fusha e Kosoves in Albanian.
I often heard the firmly held belief that the Kosovars were the most efficient at warfare of all the Balkan peoples. That they were a mountain people with a practical and hardy nature. Fighters to the bitter end. Of course, this is mere hearsay β like the belief that all Londoners talk like Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins or all French women have the inexhaustible charm of Leslie Caron.
But I still wanted to see it for myself. Arriving at Pristina Airport, we were assaulted by a well-stocked duty-free store full of Western goods, a mess of parked cars, and a crowd begging for money.
The currency is the euro, yet the whole place feels profoundly American. On the twenty-mile drive from the airport to Pristina, we passed through a hinterland that reminded me of the wasteland between East Egg and Manhattan described in The Great Gatsby. I was half expecting to see the fading advertising hoarding with the bespectacled eyes of Doctor T. Eckleburg overlooking this sinister valley of ashes. What we did see was a liminal Potemkin village of odd cafes, deserted hotels with names like Hotel de Paris or Hotel Majestic and bathroom fixtures or kitchen appliances showrooms.
