The medieval monasteries of Kosovo
The main street in Gracanica, a village on the outskirts of Pristina, the capital of Kosovo, is lined with bakeries and markets strung together in a jumble until the shop fronts give way to a high stone wall. Step to the other side, and the hum of Volkswagens and Skodas falls away almost entirely. At the center of a wide lawn sits Gracanica Monastery, a masterpiece of lateByzantine ecclesiastical architecture, its rosy domes like steppingstones that draw the eye and the spirit toward the sky.
Gracanica was the last monastery constructed, in the early 14th century, by the Serbian King Stefan Milutin, who had promised God that he would build a church for each of the 40-odd years of his reign. Inside the nave, scarcely an inch of the stone shows through the hundreds of frescoes that ascend the walls and pool in the arches of the cupolas. One need not count oneself among the faithful to be silenced by the suffusion of contemplation and colour - seabed blue, the opulent scarlets and gold halos of the sainted patriarchs of the Serbian Orthodox Church, their faces blackened remarkably little over seven centuries.
When I visited Gracanica, a protected UNESCOWorld Heritage site, in late May, Trojan Parlic, a caretaker with delicately graying curls and a corduroy blazer, led me to a rendering in the church’s nave of 16 branches of the medieval ruling dynasty. Christ the Pantocrator floated protectively at the summit. Parlic told me that the entire interior had been completed over three years, from 1318 to 1321, by two artists from Thessaloniki.
“So the painters were Greek?” I said. Parlic shrugged. “I don’t know if they were Greeks or if they were Serbs. It doesn’t matter.”
Ah, but it does. Kosovo has long been called “Serbia’s Jerusalem” because of the important medieval monasteries, like Gracanica, within its borders. It is also where the 1389 Battle of Kosovo, a defining event in the creation myth of Serbian civilization, took place. On the Kosovo plain, a valley that opens out to the northwest of Gracanica, the Christian Serbs were, according to the myth, defeated by the Muslim Turks and subsequently endured 500 years of domination under Ottoman rule. In the years leading to the breakup of Yugoslavia, Serbian epic poetry idealizing the martyrdom of 1389 breathed life into nationalist ideology that held Kosovo as the Serbian homeland “composed of heaven and earth.”
The myths can be and have been deconstructed, but that didn’t prevent them from being used as propaganda by the Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic in a campaign of systematic violence directed against Kosovo’s Albanians in the late 1990s. A NATO intervention in 1999 helped stop the violence, and in 2008, with the backing of the United States, Kosovo declared itself independent from Serbia as a new, majority-Albanian state.
At Gracanica, I stood next to Parlic before the figure of John the Baptist washing the darkness from Christ, while just above them the soldiers of a Roman army battalion advance into the frame, demanding to be baptized. This was the first instance, Parlic told me of medieval iconography displaying pagans who sought to become Christians.
Parlic leaned in closer to me. “Are you very religious?” he said.
I took that as my exit cue, and made my way across the clean lawn. From there it was a seven-minute walk through town to my hotel. Hot pink stucco houses tumbled down a country road and a scattering of wire chicken coops backed up against freshly laid brick sidewalks.
Around a bend lay Hotel Gracanica, Kosovo’s first and only boutique hotel. All right angles and clean lines of white terrazzo and Austrian pine, the hotel has a monastic air unto itself. It was opened three years ago by Andreas Wormser, a Swiss attaché who worked in the refugee section of the Swiss embassy in Kosovo after the war.
He returned to Bern, Switzerland, in 2004 but grew bored with the bureaucracy and came back to Kosovo to invest. Wormser found local partners in Hisen Gashnjani, who had worked as a translator at the embassy, and Atlan Gidjic, whom he’d met at a concert in the town where Gidjic lives. “We quickly became “kucni prijatelji,” Gidjic told me, “home friends.”
The partners had hoped for a rural location, but after two years searching the treacherous market for a land permit (“It’s never boring here,” Wormser told me), they compromised by laying out the hotel at the edge of town in a slender “L”; the 15 rooms line the length of the edifice, each with a single wall of solid glass that looks out back onto quiet hills planted with corn, the bluish outline of Kosovo’s more dramatic mountain ranges - the Accursed Mountains - hovering beyond. The airy tranquillity of the building, which opened in 2013, evokes a kind of Balkan Grand Budapest Hotel with its hard-won inoculation from the swirl of politics outside.
It seems hard to believe, but Hotel Gracanica is also one of the few multiethnic businesses in Kosovo, where Albanian and Serb communities remain in de facto segregation, and is perhaps the only hotel in the world with a majority Roma management.
In late May, just shy of the summer season, I found myself the only diner in the hotel restaurant on a Saturday night, its pine tables covered in bright geometric textiles from a nearby town. In a short time I had before me a full platter of meze in the Kosovar style, which is Turkish-inspired but distinctly Balkan: ground chicken and beef kofte, mushrooms stuffed with carrot and crème fraîche, hot peppers cooked in spicy yogurt, accompanied by
a large disc of pitarke bread, which is like pita but softer inside, and was clearly intended for multiple diners, though I finished it all myself without any problem. Ajvar, a sweet redpepper jam, brightens everything.
I wasn’t surprised to learn that the hotel is not yet turning a profit. It asserts its role as a community hub by hosting shows for local artists and musicians, and its weekend brunch draws guests from Pristina’s sizable expat crowd (the European Union maintains a heavy presence in local governance). British lawyers laze next to the pool as the afternoon sun arcs over the hills, gossiping about recent convictions of Albanian mobsters and future postings to Africa before heading back to Pristina, a 15-minute drive away.
Pristina has the beginnings of a tourism industry without the tourists, so to speak. The recently renovated airport gleams with anticipation but remains low in traffic, reflecting the euphoria that accompanied statehood eight years ago, which has turned into frustration.
The city is a postwar boomtown of sorts, with luxury high-rises popping up in every other neighbourhood and cranes in primary colours punctuating the skyline. Everyone seems to know but won’t say what’s driving the boom; Kosovo remains one of the poorest countries in Europe, and corruption has helped keep it there.
Still, 70% of the population is under 35, and many corners of Pristina rock with energy. On a weekend evening outside Dit e Nat, a bookstore of exposed brick and reclaimed wood floors that is also a cafe and event space, 30-somethings stood on a patch of gravel drinking Birra Prishtina and smoking Winstons while a Romany rock group performed. A man in Breton stripes introduced himself as an anarchist, despite, or perhaps because of, his being employed by the Interior Ministry. Women in chambray and lipstick the colour of a Bic Lady razor browsed shelves displaying Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” in Albanian, and a friend handed me a thimble-sized plastic cup spilling over with plum raki, the local brandy, which I sipped, with a choke.
Back at Hotel Gracanica, the staff helped arrange for a Serb driver to pick me up at 6 o’clock on Sunday morning. We drove across the Kosovo plain, through the early morning shadows, toward the Visoki Decani Monastery, reputedly one of the most beautiful places in the western Balkans.
The monasteries have been viewed as symbols of Serbian oppression during moments of tension and have been the target of protests. Outside the town we slalomed between brightly striated roadblocks that led to a checkpoint, where Italian marines, remnants of the NATO forces during the war, photographed our license plate before letting us inside the property.
The monastery grounds are carved into the slope of a chestnut forest. Except for the trill of a few blackbirds, a stunning silence encircles the church, its facade of alternating lavender marble and straw-coloured onyx fusing into a bright white in the sun. Decani, which was completed around 1335, is a livelier monastery than Gracanica, and the Decani monks have a reputation for their hospitality and their affinity for social media - they constantly update their Facebook page with photos of the concerts and lunches they organize for visitors.
The Decani monks are also known for their magnificent chanting. On Sunday morning the church’s nave, cool and damp and smelling lightly of incense, fills with the clear harmonies of the monks’ voices during an hour-long liturgy, the textures expanding into diminished chords before resolving into the consensus of unison. Among the hundreds of darkened frescoes, strips of light from a few high-placed windows irradiate the face of the Madonna, her mystical gaze inviting the worshipper to trust that what is unknowable to the human mind might be experienced through the ecstasy of the spirit.
Afterward, while visitors sipped raki, I spoke with Father Sava Janjic, the abbot of Decani. Father Sava is known for his humanist views - he has been criticized by Serb nationalists for helping Albanians during the war and by Albanian nationalists for his firm stance on protecting Decani and other Orthodox sites. He is also known for emphatically expressing these views on Twitter, which has earned him the title of “cyber monk.” He served me sweet apple juice from the monastery orchard.
“We happen to be something different, which doesn’t fit into someone’s political and historical narrative,” Father Sava told me, his face framed by a halo of frizzy blond hair, his expression soft except when he hit on a particularly urgent thought. The day before, the church had won a 16-year lawsuit over ownership of the property. “Unfortunately there seem to be some people who believe that they have to change history and everything in the nation-building process,” he said. “But I always say the identity of these places has to be understood in layers.”
The drive back to Hotel Gracanica took me past a construction lot promising “luxury living” at something called the Diamond Residence and a BMW dealership that had been erected next to a junkyard. The country seemed to be barrelling ahead in its rush to cover up the old layers with new ones. Maybe, it occurred to me, that’s not the only way.